Pinebook Pro & PinePhone shipping progress (2020)

[daniel]

So I got my PBP last night, though I didn't know it until this morning. According to my security system a vehicle entered and left my driveway at 10:30pm local time, we were already in bed by then so didn't notice. I got up this morning and saw the yellow rectangle on the porch and immediately knew what it was. Oddly enough, DHL tracking still shows estimated delivery for Monday.

So, first impressions. Hardware: everything seems great except just a tiny bit of looseness around the webcam; the bezel is just loose enough to make a sound when I tap it. The touchpad is definitely bugging me; I had no issues removing the infamous film, but if I haven't touched the pad for a few seconds and I go to touch it, the cursor will randomly jump to the top or bottom of the screen. It will also do so randomly while moving around. I'm not as impressed with the keyboard as others have been; the one on my ultra-cheap Dell 3160 netbook is far superior. It's not bad, it's just not great either.

Software: Good old Manjaro KDE! After updating packages and rebooting, the battery tray icon is gone. I'll look into that later as I am definitely curious about how much battery life I get out of this thing. It's not quite as snappy as Manjaro KDE on a full fat AMD64 desktop, but that's expected and it's actually pretty damn fast compared to my Raspberry Pi 4 with its customized LXDE. I'm definitely going to experiment with other supported releases before I start hacking around with Slackware; it will be interesting to see if anything outperforms the default OS with all of its hardware specific tweaks.

Thanks to @Luke  and the rest of the Pine team for making this happen despite the unavoidable delays! For those in the thread who are worried about build quality, I can honestly say it has exceeded my expectations so please don't give up hope that you'll receive a good unit. I have notoriously bad luck with purchases sight unseen, and I was taking a big risk with this one (there is no used market for these devices that I can find so I knew buying it would mean keeping it forever). I'm excited to get going with this thing and hopefully replace my Dell as my go-to portable in the near future.

Thanks for the review and first impressions. The jumping mouse sounds very annoying.