Pine.org very poor review

[rma00]

Hello,

Im  new to all of this.

I have visited pine.org in the aim to
purchase a pinephone (and maybe)
a pine laptop. I wrote twice to sales
to get some information, never got an
answer. i consulted pine.org reviews 
which confirmed that i was right about
to try and contact them beforehand.
All i found was complains.

Can some explain what's the problem
here ?

[tophneal]

not exactly an easy question to answer, honestly. but i'll try to address the complaints I've mostly seen. (of course, i'm not infallible, so other piner please feel free to correct me on any points)

to start pine64 sells devices that aren't exactly meant to put directly in the hands of consumers to tear open and start working. a lot of people have become conditioned that a "consumer device" like a laptop, tablet, or phone should just work when they receive it. pine's devices are geared more toward developing new possibilities with their devices. this means a lot of OSes, functions, and features rely on independent, volunteer developers to get them working. To many, when they receive these development devices, they feel disillusioned that they were sold an incomplete product.

this also leads into the often expected support (or lack thereof.) Pine support only really exists for sales (such as verifying defective hardware, or facilitating bulk orders.) this sales support team is really small, they aren't able to respond to every inquiry in the timely manner that people have typically expect from larger device manufacturers. in addition to the inquiries that the sales support team is there to legitimately answer, they also have to sift through inquiries from people who mistakenly assume sales support handles software support. (pine does 0% with the software on their devices, outside of making BSP sources available for developers when needed.) A lot of people aren't too happy to learn that sale support cannot and will not support software issues, too.

from my observations those are the predominant reasons so many people will negatively review pine.

putting all that aside, we have a pretty active community here. this forum is a great place to ask any questions you may have concerning either the pinebook pro or pinephone. What information are you looking to find?

[Kevin Kofler]

I assume you actually mean pine64.org? Because pine.org is the Printing Industries of New England, completely unrelated.

[KC9UDX]

I wonder where these reviews were.

This has most of the earmarks of one of those strange posts that leads to a scam.  But it almost looks more genuine.  Could this be the newer AI stuff we've been seeing?

@tophneal very well put!

[zetabeta]

i comment as a an individual and individual alone. i do not represent pine64 organization.

i have multiple pinephone regulars and pinephone pro. no other pine devices.

i have been generally speaking happy what pine org did with pinephone. actual linux, not like android linux, to which i have been disappointed over the years. i think android is abusement of linux by google. (ios is abusement of freebsd by apple).

software is different than hardware, in older days these were integrated as one and we could evaluate them as one. but these days, they are different things. what is software problem is different than hardware problem. but most people haven't changed their thinking. they may blame device based on bad software. for pine devices, hardware is definitely different than software, so basically pine64 is a hardware provider and community with possible donations provides software. i have a feeling that some people are very superficial, i mean that they only think about what is on screen and not behind the screen in a software.

[dachalife]

I agree with tophneal and feel that the “average consumer” expects these devices to be Linux versions with the same functionality as the 2 main brands, which they are not & for me, this is clearly evident by the purchase price, website &/ wiki disclaimers & information.

I would expect most of those complaints are from people who did not read the forums/wiki/or even bother to check to see which functionality worked before clicking the “add to cart” button; thus they get disappointed and leave negative reviews.

I spent quite some time lurking on the forum, researching Pine64 and the PinePhone, before finally purchasing one & I gave it a 50/50 chance of working in my area. Being a long time Linux user, 50% was good enough odds for me to give it a shot, as I had wanted out of the fruit ecosystem for years.

Out of the box the phone powered up, but wouldn’t connect to the cellular network (this is where some people stop & make a negative review). I had to actually get the correct settings from my mobile provider, manually put that data in and then I had a working unit (a lot of work /s; less than 5 minutes).

I believe this is too much for some people, who are used to being spoon-fed everything; walking into a shop and walking out with a working device, without having to do a thing & nowadays this is a way too common occurrence with most things.

As stated previously, Pine64 provides only the hardware and the community provides the software, thus sometimes an update might cause a loss of functionality/break an application/feature & then some consumers are too lazy to attempt to figure out what the problem is themselves or even wait for a solution from the community; they have that “it doesn’t work, I want to take it back now for a refund” mentality.

As for me, I’m just another happy customer, that is not employed by/for Pine64; my opinions are my own.

[gregb49]

...As stated previously, Pine64 provides only the hardware and the community provides the software, ... etc

I like what Pine64 provide having started with some of their SBCs. I like my PinePhone for its capability and flexibility. Not sure that I can fully trust it yet, but the Operating Systems are getting better and better. 

I will receive a tablet next week so am looking forward to that. I expect it to be a bit rough around the edges, but very capable at the same time.

If you buy a Pine64 product without doing the research first, then you will not understand what you get and might well be disappointed.