PineNote Community Edition: Preorder coming soon | Hacker News Reader

PineNote Community Edition: Preorder coming soon

pine64.com

83 pointsrcarmo35 comments

The specs look really decent for a regular eInk device, but the price is too high. Onyx Boox is priced similarly, but runs Android, making it instantly compatible with all kinds of eReaders (including Kindle, blergh).

PineNote is risking the fate of reMarkable: great hardware, but extremely poor software.

Isn't that what Pine does? Good hardware, and then the community is responsible for the software?

My issue with Pine devices is that the community has largely fail to make something good out of them, so they've remained paperweights (please correct me if my impression here is wrong).

A good eReader with audiobook support and with annotations is not a simple application. A community can only do so much for such niche devices.

And this ignores other applications, like shared whiteboards, note organizers, etc.

If it can run koreader it's 80% of the way there. Don't know about audio books though

It can. I have the developer edition and it came with a primitive but functional android version which I was able to get Fdroid installed and subsequently, KOReader and Termux.

IME, pine doesn't make good hardware. It's pretty terrible quality (cheap flimsy plastic, dead pixels, etc) and then they expect the "community" to work around the short comings/lack of vision and make it into a real, usable product.

I've been burned by the allure of Pine's hacker vibe. It's bullshit, IMO.

I guess it depends on what you want. I own a Pine Quartz64 board and Pinecil, both of which are perfectly fine in quality and functionality.

Maybe their white-label tablets and laptops are bad but I don't know what people expected. For stuff where support matters, they do pretty alright.

I have a Pinebook and a Pinebook Pro, neither had dead pixels.

The Boox does so by breaching quite a number of legal licenses, the PineNote seems to have actually done their due diligence and not just shrugged off the requirements that they might face.

The market they cater to are those that want to use linux distros in devices beyond PCs and laptops. For that market, the only eink tablets that exist are this one, to a lesser extent reMarkable (but AFAIK you can't really run X11 or Wayland on it), and maybe an eink portable monitor with an RPi or similar board and a battery bank taped to the back. Onyx Boox doesn't qualify.

From that perspective, with such few choices of tablets, $400 doesn't seem that bad.

> but the price is too high.

Correction: the devices are not subsidized by ads or paywalls features or services.

(Though in Pine’s case they are subsidized by unpaid workers trying to make software work on them)

Boox is not subsidized either (although they don't release their kernel sources).

>The PineNote Community Edition is aimed at Linux developers with an extensive knowledge of embedded systems and/or experience with mobile Linux.

Is this a mistake? The Developer edition has the same note (along with a more obvious red warning at the top), and if it's true, then I don't really see what the point of the "community" edition is.

The Developer Edition says "At present time, there is no default OS for the PineNote." and "The device ships without an operating system with flashing mode enabled." The Community Edition says "The OS build on this PineNote production batch contributed by PINE64 community developers. The Community Edition PineNote will be great for early adopters and should still be considered as BETA phase product." So the difference is a beta OS versus no OS at all.

In that case, it sounds like they made it more accessible, which is great, but if that warning is actually warranted, and not hyperbole, then they didn't (in my opinion), improve things enough to warrant calling it a "community" edition. Yes, technically any group can be a community, even a group of embedded systems linux developers. But I don't think many people would think of that if they saw something marketed as a "community" edition, especially in contrast to an already existing developer edition. If they meant that this is for a community of developers, then I don't know why they wouldn't just keep calling it the developer edition.

When the developer edition was released there wasn't a driver for the eink screen, there have been screenshots posted of what it looks like now that the screen works.

Ime it's fairly common to name things "community edition" if they were created with the help of the community, which is the case here.

Fair. That's a pretty reasonable reason to name it that. I still think it's slightly confusing, but I suppose that the majority of the market for this is probably people who are going to have enough background to know.

They reworked the pen and chassis it looks like. The community update they had a couple of weeks ago (on their blog) has a good amount more detail on the state of things.

> The device features a 1404 x 1872 resolution panel with a fast refresh rate

What's the refresh rate?

Also a 30 day warranty doesn't inspire much confidence, or am I missing something? Is this something you're intended to repair on your own if it breaks?

60Hz

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwMKfQtSXPE&t=150s

It can be driven at 60hz. It's not nearly that fast in practice, and when you push it you wind up with ghosting. You can see Doom happening here: https://github.com/PNDeb/pinenote-debian-image/releases

1Hz

It's e-ink. Like a Kindle.

You're missing that it's not a traditional commercial venture and it's basically sold at-cost. If you want them to make a profit then buy their merch.

I've had the reMarkable 2 for years and it's amazing. FYI, the reMarkable is itself quite hackable. There is a supported way to run an SSH server on it and push your own binaries and other files to use on the device. One example resource for hacks/mods is https://github.com/danielebruneo/remarkable2-hacks .

I'm quite surprised that based on pictures, the design looks like to be really close to a copy of the remarkable 2. Even the textile cover/holder for the tablet.

Anyway if the hardware is good, that was always my biggest issue with the remarkable being that it was hard to customize or use for anything that is not the basic official usage.

This could be kind of interesting if the software was together, but it looks power hungry, and the software (Gnome, OMG) is way too bloaty.

I'm still interested in the Inkplate. I don't understand why the Remarkable gets so much attention around here and the Inkplate doesn't.

Also the 10.3" screen is too small for an e-reader imho. I want to read ArXiv pdf's which are always A4 or letter size, about 14" diagonal. My sister just got a 13" Ipad Air and it is very nice and light. I wouldn't want anything smaller than that.

I've been interested in the progress of the PineNote since the reMarkable company decided to put certain advertised features behind a subscription paywall.

Does anyone have any information on the OS being developed looks like? I have not been able to find any videos or screenshots that indicate what interacting with the device is expected to look like. I found this blog post here, but it shows it running a GNOME environment which is... Not at all what I would hope for in this type of device: https://pine64.org/2024/10/02/september_2024/#pinenote

It's Debian running GNOME. You can install whatever UI you want from the repos, but the developers have written convenience tools in the form of GNOME extensions, which you can see in the top bar in the photos. It works fine, in my experience, modulo some finicky bits involving the onscreen keyboard. I have the original developer model, and I don't know what differences exist in the community edition.

GNOME is the one Linux desktop environment that can be said to work reasonably well on tablet devices, including the PineNote. It also has well-supported "high contrast" and "reduced animations" modes that can serve to enhance UX on an epaper display.

I think there may be a misunderstanding of my point.

The fact that GNOME works well on typical tablets isn't really relevant here. The PineNote is an E-ink device with very specific hardware constraints and use cases. It's primarily meant for reading and writing, and these tasks require software specifically optimized for E-ink displays and low-power operation.

I've personally experimented with desktop environments like XFCE and i3 on a reMarkable 2. While it was an interesting technical exercise, the experience wasn't practical for daily use. For comparison, look at the reMarkable's unofficial/hacked ecosystem (https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable) - it's full of applications and utilities specifically designed for E-ink displays and writing/reading workflows.

This is why I'm hesitant about the "community device" designation. Simply saying "it runs GNOME" doesn't tell us anything about the actual user experience for reading and writing on E-ink. To be clear, my concern isn't that it runs GNOME - it's that this seems to be the only information available about the software experience.

Here is a rather old vid of the interface I put together for use on my Pinenote. I’m still running Sway with lisgd for gestures, waybar + lavalauncher for widgets. Lots more possibilities if you are into ags/gjs, eww and others.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XKFwO4iMIgM&t=51s

It’s a great device and I wish people would be a little more open to taking the plunge with it. Forget boox—-you won’t be able to properly root it, they disrespect and even stole FOSS. Meanwhile, remarkable is cool, but anemic hardware compared to Pinenote.

I just got a chance to see this video now.

Thank you for sharing this with me. This is the first time I've seen the `rnote` app on an E-ink device. I'm quite surprised in how functional it looks, though I can already tell the latency is quite high.

I'm definitely going to keep my eye on this device though. I think it will just be a few more years before the software has caught up with the hardware.

I was quite disappointed with the pinnetime watch tbh.

I bought 2 watches, the button of broke on one of them after a month and a week, just out of warranty. Both watches get their time fully reset when out of battery, which is after a couple of days.

I really love the concept and applaud the effort and time people have put into this, but just wish the hardware was a bit better.

The latest version of infinitime allows 30 day battery on a single charge IIRC

When will the pinephone get new hardware?

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