07-07-2020, 03:45 PM
I'd say Pine64 support is practically non-existent. My PBP was shipped in the first two batches in June 2020, the ones that had an "abnormal" number of issues reported. Lucky me, I got my PBP relatively quickly, but with a broken webcam and a nasty coil whine.
After spending almost a week trying to figure out if it was a software or hardware issue I finally opened a support ticket with Pine. Initially, support team responded to my ticket and asked me to check if webcam works in the Android OS image, and after I confirmed it wasn't working they promised to forward my issue to their engineering team.
A few weeks later I still haven't heard anything back from the support team. Also, even though Pine64 admitted there was a higher-than-usual number of faulty units, there was absolutely no word on what, or even if, they were going to do something about it. Meanwhile, the 30-day warranty on my PBP was about to end, so I opened a PayPal dispute.
Another week later, and they still haven't replied to my support ticket OR my PayPal dispute... So I escalated it into a claim.
5 days after I escalated my dispute into claim Pine support finally woke up and replied to my ticket... They were finally looking into the webcam issue, blah-blah-blah, they would send me a replacement screen if they found it was at fault... But first, they wanted me to cancel my PayPal claim.
Of course, this might have been a coincidence and they would've replied to me regardless of my PayPal dispute and eventually made things right... But I've been scammed like this once before, so now I'm not going to cancel my claim given that once you close a dispute/claim you can no longer re-open it if something goes wrong later or seller decides to continue ignoring you.
After spending almost a week trying to figure out if it was a software or hardware issue I finally opened a support ticket with Pine. Initially, support team responded to my ticket and asked me to check if webcam works in the Android OS image, and after I confirmed it wasn't working they promised to forward my issue to their engineering team.
A few weeks later I still haven't heard anything back from the support team. Also, even though Pine64 admitted there was a higher-than-usual number of faulty units, there was absolutely no word on what, or even if, they were going to do something about it. Meanwhile, the 30-day warranty on my PBP was about to end, so I opened a PayPal dispute.
Another week later, and they still haven't replied to my support ticket OR my PayPal dispute... So I escalated it into a claim.
5 days after I escalated my dispute into claim Pine support finally woke up and replied to my ticket... They were finally looking into the webcam issue, blah-blah-blah, they would send me a replacement screen if they found it was at fault... But first, they wanted me to cancel my PayPal claim.
Of course, this might have been a coincidence and they would've replied to me regardless of my PayPal dispute and eventually made things right... But I've been scammed like this once before, so now I'm not going to cancel my claim given that once you close a dispute/claim you can no longer re-open it if something goes wrong later or seller decides to continue ignoring you.