So I got my pinetab2 a few weeks ago. I am going to leave aside for a moment the absolute hell it was to get this thing. How it arrived broken and how I had to argue with support for a week to get a replacement. Now that I have it and have been playing around I must say it’s sorta decent.

  1. If you can’t stand the thought of using a usb wifi dongle use ubuntu touch. Ubuntu touch has the ability to enable the internal wifi and in my testing it was stable so if you just can’t stomach the idea of a dongle that is your best bet.

  2. If you need bluetooth you are SOL at the moment

  3. if you want to watch DRM protected streams it technically dooable but not advisable. this is because to do it you need to install widevine and in my experience it takes like 5 hours to install and I never got to install it because I didn’t hit yes to a prompt in time and so I wasted like 5 hours.

So what is this tablet like to use on a day to day basis. First Issue is that this tablet has no sleep or standby mode yet. All you can do is turn the screen off. needless to say this thing is a battery killer at the moment. It gets decent battery life but with no standby you can’t make it through a day with it.

The keyboard seems nice until you try to use it. I don’t know why but I run into input lag with the keyboard. sometimes it misses characters when I type. When it is working it’s a decent keyboard overall. However it’s been a bit flaky for me.

The onscreen keyboard is actually fine except it doesn’t yet really work for desktop applications. You need to use the dock button to get the keyboard to pull up with desktop applications. For some strange reason desktop applications cannot receive numerals or the lower character from any key. It’s as if you are holding down shift all the time so good luck putting in a password or tying a url with no numbers and no “.” . Also sometimes this dock button because unresponsive and you just can’t get the keyboard to pull up no matter how much you mash the thing.

Performance is both good and terrible surprisingly. I have the 8 GB RAM model and applications can take a while to open. Video playback will stutter at times. Even old android tablets with just 2GB of ram seem to perform better. This doesn’t really make sense so I assume there is still performance tuning that needs to be done. Ubuntu Touch runs much better on this device.

My conclusion on this is that at the moment everything has it’s issues. Things work great at times but it’s very rough around the edges. You get better results if you use it more like a laptop than a tablet. However the battery life and no sleep is really annoying at the moment.

there is just a few things that are keeping me from using this as a daily driver tablet. I think they could be fixed in relatively short order so I have high hopes of having a really cool device in the coming months. I say if you have the money pick one up and even if it doesn’t work for you now you will have it for when the software has more polish.

  • exuEnglish
    5•1 year ago

    As someone who’s also had a Pinetab2 for a bit let me share some of my thoughts.

    First, I’d say the hardware is generally pretty great. The build doesn’t feel cheap or flimsy in any way to me.

    Re standby: you can enable sleep manually, though it’s still something of a battery eater. Haven’t managed to get hibernation working yet though.

    systemctl unmask sleep.target suspend.target hibernate.target hybrid-sleep.target

    For video acceleration you currently need a patched ffmpeg build. The RK something chip uses v4l2-request for video acceleration. There’s an AUR package for ffmpeg version 6 and another one for 4.4. I’m linking this instead of the repo because there are multiple branches and I can’t remember which one is used with the package. You can have a look at the PKGBUILD to find out.
    Only the decoding h.264 up to 1080p 60fps is supported at the moment though.

    I didn’t know Ubuntu Touch had working built-in wifi. Guess I’ll try that out and see if I can apply it to Arch, thanks.

    • @[email protected]OP
      2•1 year ago

      Yup you have to turn it on. But the instructions are simple once it’s done and you reboot WiFi just works. No screen rotation yet though so everything comes with a tradeoff right now.

      • exuEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        Do you have iio-sensor-proxy installed? With that screen rotation works in Gnome and KDE when you’re in tablet mode. In KDE you can go to the display setting and uncheck a checkbox so it also rotates when the keyboard is connected.
        The rotation also works with GDM btw.