Pinebook Pro Initial Impressions

[pasila9999]

Soo it finally came, I mean it only took DHL 10 hours to bring from 24km away. ?‍♂️

Everyrhing is just like I expected, Youtube works seemingly alright. More to come later...

[img]blob:https://forum.pine64.org/2935b678-b09a-4ca3-9fdc-f8334ec09b29[/img]

[MarshalDan]

I have not noticed any major defects other than a misaligned board. I will fix that when i install the nvme drive. Slight offset makes it tricky to put in usb drives, need to be angled, in order to slide in. Same on both sides.

[User 6582]

I have not noticed any major defects other than a misaligned board. I will fix that when i install the nvme drive. Slight offset makes it tricky to put in usb drives, need to be angled, in order to slide in. Same on both sides.

While I haven't experienced that misalignment, I DID have an issue with the micro-SD card port. Sometimes the card is read OK and sometimes I get errors. Turn off the PBP and uninstall/reinstall the micro-SD card and it works fine.

Anyone else noticed this? :-)

[MarshalDan]

I have not noticed any major defects other than a misaligned board. I will fix that when i install the nvme drive. Slight offset makes it tricky to put in usb drives, need to be angled, in order to slide in. Same on both sides.

While I haven't experienced that misalignment, I DID have an issue with the micro-SD card port. Sometimes the card is read OK and sometimes I get errors. Turn off the PBP and uninstall/reinstall the micro-SD card and it works fine.

Anyone else noticed this? :-)

Yes, but not exactly what you describe. I've noticed it sometime doesnt detect the SD card at all. Unplug replug and its fine again.

I'm not seeing this issue when i run the os from the sd card. I have never had a fail to boot from the sd card so far. Possibly only happens in stock debian?


Ps: here is the misaligned usb port. Pardon the glare. 4 years old abused phone...

[User 6582]

I have not noticed any major defects other than a misaligned board. I will fix that when i install the nvme drive. Slight offset makes it tricky to put in usb drives, need to be angled, in order to slide in. Same on both sides.

While I haven't experienced that misalignment, I DID have an issue with the micro-SD card port. Sometimes the card is read OK and sometimes I get errors. Turn off the PBP and uninstall/reinstall the micro-SD card and it works fine.

Anyone else noticed this? :-)

Yes, but not exactly what you describe. I've noticed it sometime doesnt detect the SD card at all. Unplug replug and its fine again.

I'm not seeing this issue when i run the os from the sd card. I have never had a fail to boot from the sd card so far. Possibly only happens in stock debian?


Ps: here is the misaligned usb port. Pardon the glare. 4 years old abused phone...

Thanks for info! I'll have to take a closer looks to see if the port is misaligned on my PBP.

More soon!! :-)

[jpakkane]

Hope to post a proper video this weekend, but here are some things to note after a few hours' usage:

• Having a matte screen is awesome
  
• The surface finish looks nice and stylish
  
• Trackpad acceleration for small movements is awful, especially considering that the default window frames on Mate seem to be one pixel wide. They are almost impossible to hit. The firmware upgrade can not come soon enough.
  
• Switching to a Finnish keyboard layout works fine, apart from the fact that typing "ä" or "ö" to the terminal causes it to interpret them as some sort of control codes.
  
• External USB sticks work, but for some reason a full external hard drive does not, dmesg has something about "UAS is blacklisted, using usb-storage instead".
  
• There are some packages missing, causing problems. As an example you can't eject USB drives, because the file manager tries to call the "eject" binary that does not exist. Installing the package "eject" fixes this.
  

[zaius]

While I haven't experienced that misalignment, I DID have an issue with the micro-SD card port. Sometimes the card is read OK and sometimes I get errors. Turn off the PBP and uninstall/reinstall the micro-SD card and it works fine.

Anyone else noticed this? :-)

I noticed that the card needs to get pushed in rather deep in order to lock into place, and I need to use a paper clip or some sort of tool to press it to get it to pop back out.

[Meatball]

Overall a very sturdy and nice piece of hardware.
The metallic case gives a very premium feel although finger grease do stick pretty easy and it scratches easy and I will keep my pbp in a leather case away from other stuff in my bag, I would advise others to do the same.

The keyboard have this really nice feel to it with a pleasant ”springiness” that gives a nice flow to typing. Not to be confused with sponginess. A more extensive key travel than normal on notebooks which is impressive considering the thickness of the machine as a whole. The keys don’t wiggle at all and the chassi gives no significant flex.
The track pad have a input lag issue, I hear pine64 are working on a fix for this as well!

I have had problems with the screen though and since I haven't seen anyone else talking about these issues elsewhere on the forum it might be a problem with my specific unit. When I first started the unit it had big problems with flickering that grew when battery drained. It got better when I disabled dimming in the power management but it didn’t go away completely. After some charging cycles I find the problem have diminished but is still present, especially when battery is low and the screen brightness is dimmed.
I have a related problem with the screen in which it emits a high frequency noise which is more apparent when brightness is turned down. Its still present when fully lit though! When there’s a lot of sound in my surroundings this is not a problem but it is quite annoying when alone in a quiet room.

The pd charger I bought to charge both my phone and the pbp doesn’t seem to be able to supply enough power as the battery still drains(albeit very slowly) while connected. It could be that the cheap charger I bought isn’t providing the advertised output, the pbp is using more than 18w of power(the rating of my charger) or that the pbp isn’t using pd to it’s fullest potential. 18W is when using 12v and 9v, using 5v provides a maximum of 15w.

The sound also turns on emitting a white noise even if set to mute. Only for a couple of seconds and not loud in any way but still there.
I tried the debian build but didn’t like is as much as the ubuntu one, can’t put my finger on why so I followed the tutorial by wizzard to install the ubuntu image om my emmc. This worked after some fixes which are explained in the tutorial. Firefox feels more stable in the ubuntu image and I haven’t experienced the crashes I had in the debian one. Might be that I installed something wrong or whatever but I include such things when I judge stability since I am somewhat of a newbie!
I do some hobby programming in c++ and qt and as such I found it really helpful that I could install the qt-creator IDE without any self-compiling or such and it installed without any problems. Compiled a simple hello world application all right. can’t speak for performance when it comes to larger programs of course.
For file syncing Owncloud client installed natively and connects to my nextcloud server as intended.


As I said, overall it’s a very nice piece of technology and i’m very happy with it! Most of the problems I mention aren’t dealbreakers and this computer have made me go outside of my comfort zone tinkering and compiling which I haven’t done before and it’s a lot of fun. I’m actually surprised how much that is working without special workarounds considering the armhf architecture and everything.

[Luke]

Thank you all for feedback make sure to test other OSs as they become available

[Watercourse]

I have a problem with a Samsung Evo micro SD which, although recognized by the system, will not mount.
It works fine on my Bionic desktop and a Windoze laptop. I am clueless, does anyone have a clue to spare?