Pinebook Pro pre-order launch

I spent all of last month’s update on the Pinebook Pro so I’ll keep this section short. Although the pre-order launch was not exactly problem-free, I feel that it went pretty well overall. Initially a bug in the database prevented people who either signed up to the forum or changed their password since late May 2019 from being accepted for a pre-order. This issue was quickly traced down and rectified (it took 40 minutes from the first report of issues to system being fixed) and, to the best of my knowledge, everyone who wanted to receive a pre-order confirmation eventually received an acceptance email. I’ve also received reports that some users, who already received their purchase-coupons, ran into issues with completing their order after selecting additional accessories such as the NVMe adapter – this has now been resolved.

I understand that the various little problems have proven frustrating to some of you, and I appreciate that it made the process less than perfect. What I will say, however, is that one of the reasons we chose to open pre-orders to the community first is so that our system could be properly tested on a smaller scale first. We’ve now learned from the launch and have ideas to further improve, streamline and simplify the pre-order system in the future. Since a similar system will likely be used for future products too, this pre-order launch effectively made for a test-run of long-term system viability. To this end, I thank those of you who signed up for pre-orders – knowingly or not, you’ve helped improve the experience for others in the future.

I sincerely hope those of you who receive the Pinebook Pro next month will take the time to actively offer feedback and help us address any potential shortcomings. Meanwhile, we’ll be opening pre-orders to everyone outside of the forum on August 25th. We expect that there is a fair amount of interest in the Pinebook Pro outside our core community and cannot wait to welcome new members into our ranks. To those community members still on the fence, deciding on whether you want a unit with 128GB eMMC: please be aware that the community member pre-orders close on August 24th. This means that from this point on only 64GB eMMC Pinebook Pro models will be built.

(Note: For those wondering about when their coupons will be emailed-out and units will be shipped, keep up to date with this thread.)

PinePhone – here is what’s happening

I expect there to be a lot of news about the PinePhone in coming weeks. If all goes well then in the next news update we’ll be taking a look at the PinePhone prototype and, granted its functional *knocks on wood*, we’ll be seeing it boot for the first time. But since my crystal ball has been malfunctioning as of late, instead of talking about the future, let’s instead focus on the things that are happening now. For starters, some developers have now received revision (2.0) of the PinePhone development kit. It fixes all of the issues that were present in previous iterations of the kit and aligns the functionality with the actual phone. We expect this to be the final revision of the board, but we will likely be replacing the touch panel on the kits and the actual phone, since the current one is giving developers grief. To consolidate things, and make development easier, we will use the same touch panel driver as the one implemented on the PineTab; we haven’t heard any complaints about the driver from developers and it clearly is superior to the one currently used on the PinePhone dev kit.

To the layman, the most important feature of the dev kit 2.0 is its capability to output video via USB-C, but there are many other tweaks that improved the operational stability of the setup. For all intents and purposes, this is just an evolution and not a revolution, and developers can happily keep on using the older development iterations until the actual phone ships. I’ve already mentioned that the prototype is being built and this is progressing well without any major setbacks. We were initially hoping to get a chance to show it off during the London meetup and get some live feedback from attendees, but due to a relatively minor delay (we’re some ~2 weeks behind schedule) it’s unlikely that we’ll have it with us. Regardless, the production of the prototype is a crucial milestone and you can take a closer look at how all the bits-and-pieces will be jigsawed together in the pictures below.