Initial Impressions

[dachalife]

The PineTab 2 came extremely well packed and was promptly delivered; I chose courier service & it arrived a day sooner than initially stated.

Boot-up was quick and straightforward without issue. Setup was also a breeze thanks to the quick reference card in the box. The build quality seems excellent; I couldn’t find any flaws. The back-lit keyboard is fine, the mouse is really accurate & responsive & the function key combos I’ve tried work.

After changing the initial passwords, I wanted to get online to check for updates; Wifi isn’t active yet, so I used the dock for my PineBook Pro (lan) and had no issues getting online. No updates were found and I installed my normal apps through terminal (personal preference) without any problems.

USB tethering seems to work flawlessly with the original PinePhone (Mobian/kernel: 5.15-sunxi64), as well as a KaiOS phone with a cheap USB OTG adapter, I used hama part #00200311 for both tests.

I’m really impressed with it so far & going to take it to work tomorrow to test it out. 

[dachalife]

Started off the morning with installing Syncthing & LibreOffice via terminal, everything synced up fine & is working well.

First real use, 6 1/2 hours; mainly with data entry in LibreOffice Calc logging events & a short hands-on demonstration: battery at 31% by the end of the day. It made it through my report day without a charge; Only shut it off during breaks with 80-90% brightness & default auto-inactivity dimming. (Really happy with that).

The keyboard is great to type on, I encountered no squishy/stuck/weak/double typing keys & everything is functioning as it should so far.

Tried the GUI Discover app for the first time during a demo of the unit this morning & encountered
bug: 462931: “No metadata URIs for vendor directory”. Terminal updates & installations are working, as well as those through Discover. Un-ticking vendor-directory- Vendor (Automatic) in Discover → Settings, stops the popup from appearing.
(Note: I had the unit out for interactive demo-use, so I don’t know if this was enabled by default).

Okular is working smoothly for .pdf’s and that’s about it for now. Do you guys want more updates on this?

[RTP]

Looking forward to trying v2. Thanks for sharing your experience!

[zoward]

I got mine yesterday, and my experience was similar to yours.  It botted right up.  I was al ittle confused about the wireless not wokring until I did a little hunting around on the internet.  Then I dug out an old USB wireless donglw (which need to be converted from USB 3 to USB C), and plugged it in.  After that, the local access points came right up in the network settings.  Typing this on the PhineTab2 now, in fact.
Once I had the internet up and running, I pulled up Konsole and typed:

pacman -Syu

to see if there were any updates.  Nothing yet.  Then I typed:

pacman -S vim mutt kstars marble

to get some appliations I use a lot.  The only one I haven't found I was looking for was Arianna, but Okular works well for PDF's, so it's not a huge deal, caibre is listed in Discover, so I may try that later.

I did some testing in two modes.  The first was using the keybaord.  In that mode, it kind of reminded me of a Chromebook, minus the Google oversight.  I'm using Angelfish right now, will probably try installing Firefox later to see how it performs.  KMail is wokring fine for my IMAP email needs, with mutt as a backup.  I unhooked the USB dongle to attach a USB drive that I use to back up my laptop, and dumped a variety of videos, images, books and music onto the drive.  mpv ended up being my goto application for the videos, as VLC tended to stutter.  mpv had surprisingly smooth playback.  It was able to handle MP4's, MKV's, FLV's and WEBM's out of the box.  Gwenview reliably handled my images, as expected.  Okular handles PDF's well, but was only successful with some of my ePubs - others had weird gaps in the display.  As for music:  my MP3's come up in VLC, but my OGG's come up in Eliza.  The playback was fine in either, and the headphones worked fine in the jack, but the speakers in the tablet itself sounded better than expected.  I didn't try FLAC's or OPUS files.

The second mode I tested was tablet mode. I took the tablet out of the case and booted it up.  The signon screen (SDDM) comes up in portrait mode.  You can fix this using a trick someone posted in the PintTab Software subforum, which involves installing xrandr and calling it from an sddm script with the right arguments.  The touch screen was very responsive.  However,the tablet doesn't seem to support rotation out of the box - maybe later  I mostly used it to surf the web and read books, and it did both capably.  I was also able to stream from YouTube in Angelfish without any stuttering.  Having KStars on a tablet means you can carry it outside to line up the view with the actual stars overhead!  This was a very gratifying moment for me.

The PineTab2 seems to take a couple of hours to charge from 50% to 100%, but I was tinkering with the wireless, etc, while it was plugged in so this may not be accurate.  Also, the estimates I got for how long it would take seemed way off (the battery indicator told me 2 hours from 50 to 100, then later said 2 hours from 98 to 100).

Overall, it's been a very pleasant experinence so far!  I'm way ahead of where i expected to be when I took it out of the box. I'm looking forward to ditching my Android tablet for good once we get a working wireless driver.

[dachalife]

6/07
This morning, installed Firefox via terminal w/o problems on lan. Today was a strictly tethered one, via mobile data with a USB adapter: hama part #00200311 (& no I don’t work for hama :-P).

Installed a few more apps throughout the day (as needed for work), with both Discover & terminal on mobile data, with no issues; Everything is working smoothly and battery life is fine. Borrowed our camera’s micro sd card for some extra storage ;-), even though it isn’t needed yet.
------------
6/08
Started the morning with updates, installed a new pinetab2 package, update & reboot, fine. Decided to try for USB wifi with a tp-link AC1300; had to add new connection, did the settings and viola, wifi. The antenna is a bit big compared to the tablet itself, but I can see lots of my neighbors’ hardware broadcasting.

Had some down-time at work, so used mobile tethering to install the BlackArch repo and started to peruse & install various tools; I love a new installation, deciding what to add, it’s like Xmas as kid (encountered no problems).

Used it off & on for 5 hours, installing various items via terminal, light web browsing (Firefox & tried out LibreWolf), while doing some things in vi & had okular open all the while. Got home and the battery was at 53%, using a display brightness of 80%; I’m impressed.

This device has so far exceeded my expectations, I am so glad that it didn’t have Manjaro pre-installed; I didn’t have to redo it out of the box, which was a huge time-saver.

I do feel a little guilty though, my PBP has been sitting on my desk unused since I received my PT2.

[dachalife]

Another full day at work with only my PT2 and …. everything went great! No issues of any kind, apps & tools are working fine, as well as battery life.

Disclaimer: I’m not using it for games, movies or social media, I’m using it for work and I did not use/test the aforementioned types of applications.

Even at this early stage without built-in wifi/Bluetooth/cameras working, everything I needed was there or only a command away; I’m an old Linux guy, so tethering doesn’t bother me & I prefer it’s security; On my PP, those dip switches are always off anyway.

With that said, I would not recommend it to anyone with little/no Linux experience/to today’s smartphone addict/to an impatient person (like some recent forum posters). If you experienced Linux in the 90’s & knew what you were doing or know what 2600 is & why, you’ll love it.

After just a few days of testing, today, I decommission my work Spypad; with this hardware & Arch, I feel that I will be able to make the PT2 an acceptable replacement.

Great job on this device Pine64 Team!

[dachalife]

Damn, deactivating my pear account took longer than my first update on my PT2