10 ms·

Introducing the PineNote

586 points by DanAtC 5y ago

megous 5y ago
The post doesn't go much into details of the effort that went into the firmware development for the PinePhone keyboard, but I've documented it along the way, for the curious, together with options of what may be possible thanks to me writing FOSS implementation of the whole SW stack for the keyboard, and the surrounding tooling. Most of the last few month's worth of posts here are about the keyboard https://xnux.eu/log https://xnux.eu/log
- mtrovo 5y ago
  Wow that's wild, really nice write up. I see this kind of post and feel humbled by the effort to create something that I take for granted. Is this normal procedure for integrating a new keyboard or this particular model was an outlier?
  - megous 5y ago
    I don't know. This is my first keyboard firmware. Anyway, the EM85F684A is a really obscure MCU, so there was no other way than to start completely from scratch, to have FOSS development/flashing tooling and the firmware itself. There's nothing pre-existing available online. I've never heard about Elan before starting this project. It would have certainly been easier to support a more common MCU. Certainly more than half of the effort went into reverse engineering and figuring out the unknowns.
- alwaystradeoffs 5y ago
  Thanks megi for your great contributions to Pine hardware. -- A happy Pinephone user.
  - megous 5y ago
    You're welcome. :)
candiddevmike 5y ago
Was hoping for more details about their RISC offering. I briefly looked for an entry-level board and they're either vastly underpowered or way out of a "hobbyist" price range.
- fireTwoOneNine 5y ago
  The latest Pine board is the Quartz64, which is basically the same platform as the PineNote. https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Quartz64 https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Quartz64
  - aidenn0 5y ago
    I assume GP was asking about risc-v. The Quartz64 is aarch64.
- aidenn0 5y ago
  The only RISC-V board I'm aware of is the one used in the Pinecil, and it's definitely "underpowered" for a general purpose machine, though it's pretty beefy for a lot of embedded uses: GD32VF103TB 32-bit RV32IMAC RISC-V “Bumblebee Core” @ 108 MHz
chucky_z 5y ago
This blog post just got me so excited. I've seen what Pine started with and now in my head I just keep thinking "keep going keep going!!" This is hopefully the kick in the pants the tech giants need, a small company slowly eating up even a tiny percentage of their sales and doing it with cheaper and completely open (and arguably better?) products. I am mostly all-in on Apples ecosystem because I've been so continuously disappointed by the fragmentation on the Android ecosystem, and this is something that's seriously giving me a real hit of excitement!
- zepto 5y ago
  Yes. I couldn’t agree more. No amount of complaining at Apple will make them build an open ecosystem. It’s just not in their DNA. Supporting these guys will help them to do it. Buy their stuff, but equally important - contribute to the software ecosystem to make these devices ready for regular users to adopt.
- zibzab 5y ago
  > the fragmentation on the Android ecosystem What does this even mean in 2021? That you can buy phones in any shapes and colors you want? Is that really a bad thing? I mean, you could stick to Google and that would give you 1-2 models per year if that's your thing
dchuk 5y ago
This is a pretty sweet looking device. Even despite this call out “As for the actual user interface, we’re currently talking to the good folks at KDE and trying to figure out whether Plasma Mobile or regular Plasma (with panel-specific tweaks of course) will be the best fit for this particular device. As you can probably tell, this is an uncharted territory for all parties involved, but we’ll figure it out. Needless to say, the software isn’t finished – indeed, we don’t really even know yet what will work well with this technology and what won’t. It is just the beginning of our journey with e-ink technology, and it will take a long time and much effort to make the PineNote end-user worthy.” This still seems worthwhile to pre order if you’re a heavy reader and note taker. Anyone know how this compares with the remarkable?
- rvz 5y ago
  > Needless to say, the software isn’t finished – indeed, we don’t really even know yet what will work well with this technology and what won’t. Exactly. This why I would wait for their next version of this product to see if they have made more improvements. From [0]: Compared to reMarkable, PineNote is using modern hardware with more RAM and disk space. But ultimately, I would wait for version two of this device rather than to be an early adopter on the first version. [0] https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/articles/360006699537-About-reMarkable-2- https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/articles/36000669953...
rvz 5y ago
At least this one is using modern 64 bit hardware with more RAM and disk space on the system, unlike the reMarkable 2 [0]. Great job from the Pine64 folks, looking forward to the second version of this product. Downvoters: I'm trying to give you a good deal here. PineNote is almost the same price, if not cheaper and can store more files than the reMarkable 2's 8GB of internal storage. No need to rely on the cloud for external storage. What is wrong with having another competitor coming in with an alternative that uses modern hardware even when it is close to the same price as the reMarkable 2? Think about it. [0] https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/articles/360006699537-About-reMarkable-2- https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/articles/36000669953...
- Aeolun 5y ago
  > What is wrong with having another competitor coming in with an alternative Nothing at all, but generally a competitor has to be better to dislodge the incumbent. I don’t see much here yet that would make me consider this over Remarkable. Price point is what generally makes me consider a lot of pine stuff over other things, but it doesn’t really apply for this one.
  - rvz 5y ago
    Ok, Makes sense. It's the first version of the PineNote anyway so I would wait for the second revision to see if they have improved it. I'll give it another 8 months or a year and see; same goes for the Remarkable. Once again, thanks for your reply.
    - Aeolun 5y ago
      I already have the Remarkable, and am very satisfied with it. That may color my opinion a bit.
Naac 5y ago
Looks like a direct competitor to the Remarkable[0] which I own, and is a great device. The Remarkable is also "mostly" open. The main binary running the UI of the system is proprietary, but the Linux system underneath is ssh-able, and the hacking community of the device is pretty active and large [1]. Looking at the announcement page of the PineNote I'm very excited! I'm hoping the open software running on the PineNote will be comparable to the Remarkable, and if it is I'm definitely going to be making the switch. As a side note, I'm hoping maybe this encourages the Remarkable team to open source their proprietary binary. Their advantage here is definitely the hardware not the software. [0] https://remarkable.com/ https://remarkable.com/ [1] https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable
- BoorishBears 5y ago
  I preordered the new Remarkable and ended up having to re-gift it Tablets used to suck, doubly so when using them with pens. The screens were low res, low brightness, they were slow to respond to pen strokes, battery life sucked, I could go on. So e-ink digital notebooks made a ton of sense. They solved a lot of these issues in exchange for some limiting general utility. - Now fast forward to 2021 and a $300 iPad has one of the fastest responding pens in the industry, the screen is bright enough for daylight, it comfortably does a full day of work without charging... It's an amazing piece of tech with huge amounts of utility, incredible drawing and plotting apps. I feel like that muddies the waters for digital notebooks. I know it used to be taboo to say that ("Tablets are tablets and eReaders are eReaders!!!") but I don't know anymore. If you're someone who will tinker with your Remarkable (or PineNote), I seriously recommend trying an iPad. The Remarkable still wins for distraction-free work in stock form, but if you're one to tinker for utility, the utility is just there with the iPad, and doesn't sacrifice that much in the writing department
  - feanaro 5y ago
    You've described why iPad doesn't suck terribly compared to the Remarkable but I didn't see you mention any of its advantages. Are there any?
filleokus 5y ago
> The 10.1 inch, 3:4 panel has a resolution of 1404×1872 (227 DPI), can display 16 levels of grayscale and is capable of a 60hz refresh rate 60 hz!? This + some paired keyboard + wifi-tethering + SSH (or even a remote session with VS Code!?) would probably be an awesome code-while-in-the-sun-setup. Really excited to see where this ends up.
- solarkraft 5y ago
  The 60Hz must be a mistake. That type of rate plain isn’t possible with e-ink.
  - green7ea 5y ago
    I think so too but if the 60Hz is not a mistake, it will change my life. I hope it's not ;-)
    - DennisAleynikov 5y ago
      at 60hz, an electro phoretic display (EPD) or eink will start to degrade very rapidly and consume more power than even a bright OLED panel will. Eink is efficient only when you are NOT refreshing the screen constantly as it persists the last image drawn to screen, but if you wanna do any kind of scrolling, zooming etc, just use another kind of display tech.
      - mdp2021 5y ago
        > degrade very rapidly E-Ink displays were declared having a lifespan of 10 million switches per dot: you would have to do a study about how often the average pixel is changed, but if that value were 5s, the lifespan would be "five years of short week 9-to-5" - that is not bad. I am not sure if A2 mode or Greyscale Update with frequent dot switching is a stress that makes the dots degrade faster (not simply "decrease the life count going towards the max", but "decreasing the max"). I supposed not dramatically.
        5y ago
solarkraft 5y ago
I’m a bit underwhelmed by the price. This costs as much as the current-gen Remarkable, with more power, but likely worse build quality and software and only slightly higher hackability. That said I’m still excited for cool e-ink applications, like finally an optimized browser. Also: Competition to those Onyx devices with Android apps running through WayDroid (should be possible on the Remarkable, but I haven’t seen anyone try it). … which raises an interesting point. Will these things come with a working Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) for modern Wayland compositors to run?
- rjsw 5y ago
  Build quality has been good for all the Pine64 products that I own.
- rich_sasha 5y ago
  Looks cheaper than remarkable. For me (UK) it is £399 + £99 for a pen (!) which is in fact a consumable. If I want a book-cover type thing, that’s another £99. And it’s GBP not USD. So that’s probably altogether about 50% cheaper? I love the idea of remarkable, but cant justify £600 spend on a better notebook.
  - chrismorgan 5y ago
    > £99 for a pen (!) which is in fact a consumable. The pen tips are consumables, the pen itself isn’t.
    - rich_sasha 5y ago
      Ah that I missed, good to know.
  - bodge5000 5y ago
    The supernote may be of interest, the pen nibs don't need replacing. No idea how it compares to the RM2, a lot of people seem to rate it favourably but very few people have owned both so I don't know if thats just buy in hype. Theres a few youtube comparisons, but I have no intention of watching a 45 minute video that will end with "its up to you".
danShumway 5y ago
Oh, this is exciting. The performance and latency is a huge variable though. For a lot of these experimental hacker-friendly devices, I'm willing to tolerate a lot of compromises. Even here, the software, the out-of-the-box experience isn't really that important to me. Arguably, you can get away with even more compromise on a device like this than on something like the Pinephone. But it has to have amazing pen performance, or it's just not worth working with. Everything else except that is either fixable or something that probably isn't getting in the way of the core point of the device. IMO Remarkable got this right -- their software support is by many metrics quite bad (although I guess it's slowly started to improve). Their device handles PDFs kind of poorly from what I can tell. It's expensive. The interface seems slower and more laggy than many other EReaders. But none of that really matters, what matters is they have arguably the best pen latency and physical texturing on the E-ink market, and that writing on the device feels good. So the same thing applies here: the price seems completely reasonable to me, I have no issues with a $400 price tag. I'd pay $600, the price isn't the issue. But I need to see videos and testimonial that the pen latency isn't just "acceptable", but that it's really good. Otherwise it's not even worth $100. Writing experience is one of those things where once you get used to a lack of latency/offset, and used to a more accurate feel, it gets progressively harder and harder to go back to anything that's worse.
- tadfisher 5y ago
  The thing is, the ReMarkable isn't doing anything special hardware-wise to achieve that latency, as they're based on NXP reference designs with the same integrated EPD every other E-ink device is using (besides the Android-based devices, of course). The magic is essentially that they have nothing running on the device except a Qt app which writes directly to the framebuffer, and they have an extremely simplified framebuffer driver that allows the Qt app to implement the complex parts of updating an E-ink screen in userspace. The Wacom input is standard, the other kernel bits are standard, and they're even running systemd.
  - danShumway 5y ago
    That's really positive if that's the case -- I was under the impression that some of this had to do with the hardware itself. At the very least though, aren't they are doing some special stuff with how they mount the screen and where they're sourcing their plastic texture cover from? I thought that offset was one of the big reasons they didn't have a backlight -- which the Pinenote will have I think. But this makes me feel a lot more confident about the PineNote if most of the latency at least comes down to framebuffer access.
megous 5y ago
Seeing cypress touch controller used in PineNote... Mainline cyttsp4 driver is buggy, incomplete, sucks and there are no docs for the touch controller. You can't even do calibration with the mainline driver, which is necessary to have a usable touchscreen. The vendor dropped the ball on that driver right after getting it mainline years ago - they didn't touch it ever since. It doesn't even support device tree. So there's gonna be some pain, for whoever will want to get that thing working mainline.
- Klasiaster 5y ago
  Choosing HW components which are not supported in mainline Linux or don't even have an upstreamable driver ready is the main criticism I have, too. I wish there was a way to have the hardware designed so that is works from day one with a recent Linux kernel instead of the mess with the PinePhone: the WiFi driver is of such a bad quality that it's not upstreamed, and of course totally buggy. Also, a similar situation can also be found with the device firmware: both the USB controller and the modem don't have a good vendor firmware and the community needs to debug this stuff - I wish only known-to-be-working components get selected in the first place.
dom96 5y ago
I am really amazed by the amount of products Pine64 is releasing. Anyone know how they are able to do this/what their story is?
- megous 5y ago
  They don't waste time with the software side of things. :)
- paulcole 5y ago
  Unrefined. Low build quality — remember when one of their product pages effectively said, “Don’t buy this if you can’t handle a couple dead pixels.” Their goal is to ship as much stuff as possible and then leave it up to the “community” to improve the software while the hardware is at-best third-rate. Result is a bunch of releases people want to like but never measure up. Best reviews you’ll see are like, “It’s passable for the price if you can live with…”
  - commoner 5y ago
    I've found the PineTime to be extremely well-built and comparable to the original Fitbit Versa in terms of hardware quality. No dead pixels. For $27 plus shipping, it was an excellent deal. For those looking for a buying experience similar to traditional retail stores, Pine64 previously announced that they would launch online stores selling products with longer warranties and broader customer support at higher price points: https://www.pine64.org/2020/12/02/pine-store-community-pricing-online-retail-stores/ https://www.pine64.org/2020/12/02/pine-store-community-prici...
nabilhat 5y ago
> The PineNote is one of, if not the, most powerful e-ink device available on the market. It shares in much of the Quartz64’s pedigree, sporting the same RK3566 quad-core A55 SoC paired with 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM and 128GB eMMC flash storage. There's so much opportunity in the e-ink space just waiting for something to crack open. E-ink devices have felt so much like the TI-84 of the tablet world, or inkjet printers 25 years ago - overpriced and underpowered. There's a lot of work ahead for the Pine community to get to performance on par with existing e-ink tablets. Remarkable's setting the example now, which is frankly quite an achievement on two 1.2GHz cores with 1GB RAM. Pine's twice as many, ~50% faster cores, with 4x the RAM should help.
- chrismorgan 5y ago
  reMarkable 1 is 1GHz single-core with 512MB of RAM, and that’s entirely sufficient for what it’s primarily designed for, writing. PDF rendering is the main thing that can be slow, agonisingly so in some cases. I imagine that’s the main reason why they boosted reMarkable 2 to dual-core 1.2GHz and 1GB of RAM. (It wasn’t for things like startup time—https://old.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/jfgpqw/rm1_vs_rm2_boot_time_20sec_both_with_1_sec/ https://old.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/jfgpqw/rm... shows both 1 and 2 taking about 20 seconds, with 2 actually the slower by a second or so.) Quad-core 1.8–2GHz and 4GB of RAM is, if used fairly sensibly, massive overkill for most purposes e-paper has been used for so far, with image-heavy PDFs being the most likely exception (incidentally, I’m not sure if such rendering can be parallelised or not). It’s easily enough to run full desktop environment stuff. So yeah, it’ll be interesting to see what comes of it. Screen latency is certainly the key to the whole puzzle.
  - ignaloidas 5y ago
    Since PineNote will have an actual GPU unlike reMarkable, I do expect that it will handle many PDF's without much trouble.
  - schmorptron 5y ago
    They say they're deciding between plasma mobile and a customized full plasma as an interface so maybe hopefully they can actually provide a low-latency input layer which seems hard to do on Android.
123pie123 5y ago
I will probably buy this, but if the pine people are reading this, please please create a larger one
squarefoot 5y ago
This is really interesting. I was searching for something like that: big screen, no cloud or other services dependency, FOSS, nice price, etc. I just want to see its performance when dealing with old books and magazines that are 100% scanned graphics with no OCR, and/or PDFs with complex diagrams, schematics etc. Those usually bring to knees the less powerful readers and would probably require some serious CPU power along with more RAM and storage. It would also be nice if the software could sync with a NFS or SMB/CIFS local (or remote via VPN?) server plus local caching so users can have their entire library at hand without using USB keys or SD cards. Also please, add one 3.5 headphone jack if it's not already there (from the article it seems not). And the PinePhone keyboard also looks gorgeous!
- chrismorgan 5y ago
  A 3.5mm jack isn’t going to be easy to fit into a tablet that’s 7mm thick. It’s about a millimetre thicker than USB-C.
  - red369 5y ago
    The 5th gen iPod Touch (and 6th and 7th) is only 6.1 mm thick, so while I don't think just because Apple can pull it off Pine64 should be able to also, it seems like there might physically be enough space. I was going to note that the 5th gen iPod Touch is from 2012, but then it feels like much of the miniaturisation progress since then has involved removing the jack. Agree that it's probably not easy though.
Aeolun 5y ago
I would kind of like Pine to focus on the supply chain for their current products. I’ve been looking to buy a pinebook for a while, but it’s been out of stock, or reserved for some kind of thing or another for a while now. That’s not an uncommon occurrence when landing on one of their product pages.
- squarefoot 5y ago
  If I recall correctly, their production has been hurt by the pandemic just when they were starting to deliver some of their most wanted products. Many businesses were hurt as well, but they're a lot smaller and will likely require more time. They're also selling small quantities at low prices, which translates in lower margins. That's probably the reason they cant expose themselves with the risks of big volume productions. To me it's just a matter of time, hopefully short.
chx 5y ago
Surprised no one mentions the Dasung not-eReader, a shockingly capable eInk device -- it doubles as a monitor, both the 7.8" and the 10.3" sized version. It's very expensive though :( I wonder whether the PineNote could add a video input as well...
Nerada 5y ago
Does anyone know if this will support encryption at rest?
- fsflover 5y ago
  Very likely, at some point. It runs regular Linux.
mixmastamyk 5y ago
I ordered the pine phone after the apple news broke last week. They demand a phone number to ship it, which is a reason why I’m buying. They have a while to go, unfortunately.
Causality1 5y ago
DHL sent all PinePhones to NZ, so we had to reship all orders (sorry for the delay) DHL is the worst shipper I have ever used and the only thing they're good for is pissing off your customers. The savings aren't worth it when you start being sent videos of them bending cardboard poster tubes in half so they can shove them into mailboxes.
hackshack 5y ago
Long time e-ink hacker. This is cheerful news. I'm a paper-fiend and adore my reMarkable 2 as a paper replacement. But let's get down to brass tacks. Points to the PineNote vs. reMarkable 2: 1. PineNote has 128GB storage whereas RM2 has 8GB. 2. PineNote has frontlit eink display. RM2 has no illumination. (This is a big one.) 3. PineNote has speakers + mic. RM2 does not. Points to the RM2 vs. PineNote: 1. reMarkable 2 is 4.7mm thin vs. PineNote "just over 7mm thick." I know it sounds like "spec wars," but this is a big deal, to me at least. My dream is an electronic index card, bendable and everything. 7mm is... smartphone and iPad territory. It's not bad, but it's not great. The promise of e-ink is that it is gloriously thin, like 65lb cardstock. 2. reMarkable 2 has the nice frosted tempered glass back. PineNote has plastic back with what looks like a... generous taper to squeeze the 7mm in. 3. Subjective, but the PineNote puts the pen at the top. I think the emergent universal style of magnetically docking the pen on the side is better. It's a little more friendly for left-handed users as they can always flip the pad and reorient it in software. With the pen at the top, now they have to reach for the bottom. If you rest the pad in your lap, now the pen becomes disconnected. The reMarkable software is very good, albeit closed. I have struggled to build a decent e-ink focused desktop environment on my hacked Kindle. Pine will require a strong effort to build a first-class UX. All said, as a hacker, I'd go for the PineNote in a heartbeat. e-ink tablets are still somewhat future tech, so Joe and Jane Consumer would be better served by an iPad, or reMarkable 2 if they're feeling brave. The UX makes (and breaks) it. I won't go into the iPad vs. eink discussion except to say I have an iPad Pro + Pencil for non-handwriting tasks. Writing on glass is fatiguing. I will check out the screen covers that give more paper tooth. It would be great to see aggressive optimization on thinness in the next generation. Things can be open, and thin. If you're new to the e-ink tablet scene, these price points are unbelievable compared with the state of the art 10-15 years ago. Don't think of them as iPads or Surfaces. It's different tech, not for everyone. But if you're a handwriter or have your nose in PDFs all day, it's a game-changer.
2Gkashmiri 5y ago
so i want to know how much of this price is licensing costs? suppose today the e-ink patent goes public, is free to use, how much of a price delta can we see?
- robinsoh 5y ago
  > so i want to know how much of this price is licensing costs? suppose today the e-ink patent goes public, is free to use, how much of a price delta can we see? What licensing cost? Who is licensing what from E Ink? What patent? Please be specific. I work in the display industry. See my comment history for how many times I've asked this question and also have a look at the replies people give. So far, I've never found a satisfying answer. I'm starting to think people who say this stuff don't actually have a clue about the display industry, or are unwilling to acknowledge things like how volume is the main determinant of price in the industry today.
  - traverseda 5y ago
    It's purportedly hard to get real information because of various non-disclosure agreements. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143407 Goes over it in more depth. If such NDA's exist it would be hard to tell, but certainly we can see various things that suggest that those NDAs are real. Why do you think e-ink displays are so much more expensive than equivalent LCD/OLD displays? Technology wise they're very similar, and enough e-ink displays have been shipped that we should have started to see diminishing returns on the economics of scale.
    - robinsoh 5y ago
      > Goes over it in more depth. It does not. You can see in that thread, I had asked there as well and the throwaway account never responded to me. I'm pretty sure it is fake as that narrative describes things like "strongarms the display manufacturers and the users of their displays" which would cause uproar in the display industry and all of us would have heard of it. > Why do you think e-ink displays are so much more expensive than equivalent LCD/OLD displays? Volume. Volume. Volume. The typical MOQ for an LCD order would be in the tens of millions of units per quarter. Even the highest volume E Ink panel presumably the one in Kindle, would be at best several million a year. > Technology wise they're very similar No, they are not. Electrophoretic displays are very different than LCDs which are again very different than OLED. > enough e-ink displays have been shipped that we should have started to see diminishing returns on the economics of scale. In order to reach lower prices, you have to reach higher volumes so that you get closer to the bare materials cost. If you're only selling a few million displays per year, you'll never achieve sufficient volume to justify building a fully custom production line in order to reach the asymptote of materials cost.
rigmarole 5y ago
Just to point out that this isn't ready as a consumer device quite yet. This is from down the page: > We’re seeing a lot of excitement and “shut up and take my money, I’ll throw out my other e-ink devices tomorrow!” responses to this post, but remember that we are a community of developers first and foremost. If you’re looking to buy a PineNote in the first batch, you must expect to write software for it, not to write notes on it. The software shipping from the factory for the first batch will not be suitable for taking notes, reading e-books, or writing your dissertation. It may not even boot to a graphical environment. However, we are excited for what you’ll create with this device and we’re ready to take the journey with you. We’ll be posting more updates on software progress on this blog as they come in.
armchairhacker 5y ago
$399 I really wish there was a basic, cheap e-ink tablet on the market. Basic and cheap. We have basic but not cheap. AFAIK e-ink isn’t pricey to make, it’s just that the E-ink company is a monopoly so they jack up the price. Which is a shame, because i would buy an e-ink if they weren’t so expensive.
- ShakataGaNai 5y ago
  Monopoly and patents, I believe. So yes, it's technically not expensive to make, but licensing. R&D costs money, take that to mean what you want. Unfortunately the laws in our world have not caught up with technology changes.
  - robinsoh 5y ago
    > Monopoly and patents, I believe. So yes, it's technically not expensive to make, but licensing. R&D costs money, take that to mean what you want. Unfortunately the laws in our world have not caught up with technology changes. What monopoly? There's no monopoly on bistable displays or even electrophoretic displays. What patents? Please try to be specific. I work in the display industry. The only place I hear stuff like what you're saying is on HN, which previously got picked up by Boing Boing and then blogs and then comments on HN which referenced those blogs. Surely, if this patent hell or monopoly hell was true we would have heard about it. Surely I would have heard about this problem from colleagues, coworkers or even gossip at conferences. Could you elaborate on your claim ? Please see my comment history to see why I keep asking about this. Hopefully this time I can get a positive data point where I can learn something unlike what I got the last time I tried to ask about this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27980391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27980391
    - tadfisher 5y ago
      What is unsatisfactory about the patents that other commenters have repeatedly pointed out to you, and that obviously cover electrophoretic display technologies and manufacturing methods? Perhaps these are avoidable, but could you elaborate how, as someone who works in the display industry? For reference, here are a few more, easily found via Google Patents: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9792861B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US9792861B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US9792862B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US9792862B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7050040B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7050040B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US8724212B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US8724212B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US8643939B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US8643939B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US9778538B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US9778538B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7259744B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7259744B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7256765B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7256765B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7548366B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7548366B2/en

586 points by DanAtC 5y ago

The post doesn't go much into details of the effort that went into the firmware development for the PinePhone keyboard, but I've documented it along the way, for the curious, together with options of what may be possible thanks to me writing FOSS implementation of the whole SW stack for the keyboard, and the surrounding tooling. Most of the last few month's worth of posts here are about the keyboard https://xnux.eu/log https://xnux.eu/log

mtrovo 5y ago
Wow that's wild, really nice write up. I see this kind of post and feel humbled by the effort to create something that I take for granted. Is this normal procedure for integrating a new keyboard or this particular model was an outlier?
- megous 5y ago
  I don't know. This is my first keyboard firmware. Anyway, the EM85F684A is a really obscure MCU, so there was no other way than to start completely from scratch, to have FOSS development/flashing tooling and the firmware itself. There's nothing pre-existing available online. I've never heard about Elan before starting this project. It would have certainly been easier to support a more common MCU. Certainly more than half of the effort went into reverse engineering and figuring out the unknowns.
alwaystradeoffs 5y ago
Thanks megi for your great contributions to Pine hardware. -- A happy Pinephone user.
- megous 5y ago
  You're welcome. :)

candiddevmike 5y ago

Was hoping for more details about their RISC offering. I briefly looked for an entry-level board and they're either vastly underpowered or way out of a "hobbyist" price range.

fireTwoOneNine 5y ago
The latest Pine board is the Quartz64, which is basically the same platform as the PineNote. https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Quartz64 https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Quartz64
- aidenn0 5y ago
  I assume GP was asking about risc-v. The Quartz64 is aarch64.
aidenn0 5y ago
The only RISC-V board I'm aware of is the one used in the Pinecil, and it's definitely "underpowered" for a general purpose machine, though it's pretty beefy for a lot of embedded uses: GD32VF103TB 32-bit RV32IMAC RISC-V “Bumblebee Core” @ 108 MHz

chucky_z 5y ago

This blog post just got me so excited. I've seen what Pine started with and now in my head I just keep thinking "keep going keep going!!" This is hopefully the kick in the pants the tech giants need, a small company slowly eating up even a tiny percentage of their sales and doing it with cheaper and completely open (and arguably better?) products. I am mostly all-in on Apples ecosystem because I've been so continuously disappointed by the fragmentation on the Android ecosystem, and this is something that's seriously giving me a real hit of excitement!

zepto 5y ago
Yes. I couldn’t agree more. No amount of complaining at Apple will make them build an open ecosystem. It’s just not in their DNA. Supporting these guys will help them to do it. Buy their stuff, but equally important - contribute to the software ecosystem to make these devices ready for regular users to adopt.
zibzab 5y ago
> the fragmentation on the Android ecosystem What does this even mean in 2021? That you can buy phones in any shapes and colors you want? Is that really a bad thing? I mean, you could stick to Google and that would give you 1-2 models per year if that's your thing

dchuk 5y ago

This is a pretty sweet looking device. Even despite this call out “As for the actual user interface, we’re currently talking to the good folks at KDE and trying to figure out whether Plasma Mobile or regular Plasma (with panel-specific tweaks of course) will be the best fit for this particular device. As you can probably tell, this is an uncharted territory for all parties involved, but we’ll figure it out. Needless to say, the software isn’t finished – indeed, we don’t really even know yet what will work well with this technology and what won’t. It is just the beginning of our journey with e-ink technology, and it will take a long time and much effort to make the PineNote end-user worthy.” This still seems worthwhile to pre order if you’re a heavy reader and note taker. Anyone know how this compares with the remarkable?

rvz 5y ago
> Needless to say, the software isn’t finished – indeed, we don’t really even know yet what will work well with this technology and what won’t. Exactly. This why I would wait for their next version of this product to see if they have made more improvements. From [0]: Compared to reMarkable, PineNote is using modern hardware with more RAM and disk space. But ultimately, I would wait for version two of this device rather than to be an early adopter on the first version. [0] https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/articles/360006699537-About-reMarkable-2- https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/articles/36000669953...

rvz 5y ago

At least this one is using modern 64 bit hardware with more RAM and disk space on the system, unlike the reMarkable 2 [0]. Great job from the Pine64 folks, looking forward to the second version of this product. Downvoters: I'm trying to give you a good deal here. PineNote is almost the same price, if not cheaper and can store more files than the reMarkable 2's 8GB of internal storage. No need to rely on the cloud for external storage. What is wrong with having another competitor coming in with an alternative that uses modern hardware even when it is close to the same price as the reMarkable 2? Think about it. [0] https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/articles/360006699537-About-reMarkable-2- https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/articles/36000669953...

Aeolun 5y ago
> What is wrong with having another competitor coming in with an alternative Nothing at all, but generally a competitor has to be better to dislodge the incumbent. I don’t see much here yet that would make me consider this over Remarkable. Price point is what generally makes me consider a lot of pine stuff over other things, but it doesn’t really apply for this one.
- rvz 5y ago
  Ok, Makes sense. It's the first version of the PineNote anyway so I would wait for the second revision to see if they have improved it. I'll give it another 8 months or a year and see; same goes for the Remarkable. Once again, thanks for your reply.
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    I already have the Remarkable, and am very satisfied with it. That may color my opinion a bit.

Naac 5y ago

Looks like a direct competitor to the Remarkable[0] which I own, and is a great device. The Remarkable is also "mostly" open. The main binary running the UI of the system is proprietary, but the Linux system underneath is ssh-able, and the hacking community of the device is pretty active and large [1]. Looking at the announcement page of the PineNote I'm very excited! I'm hoping the open software running on the PineNote will be comparable to the Remarkable, and if it is I'm definitely going to be making the switch. As a side note, I'm hoping maybe this encourages the Remarkable team to open source their proprietary binary. Their advantage here is definitely the hardware not the software. [0] https://remarkable.com/ https://remarkable.com/ [1] https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable

BoorishBears 5y ago
I preordered the new Remarkable and ended up having to re-gift it Tablets used to suck, doubly so when using them with pens. The screens were low res, low brightness, they were slow to respond to pen strokes, battery life sucked, I could go on. So e-ink digital notebooks made a ton of sense. They solved a lot of these issues in exchange for some limiting general utility. - Now fast forward to 2021 and a $300 iPad has one of the fastest responding pens in the industry, the screen is bright enough for daylight, it comfortably does a full day of work without charging... It's an amazing piece of tech with huge amounts of utility, incredible drawing and plotting apps. I feel like that muddies the waters for digital notebooks. I know it used to be taboo to say that ("Tablets are tablets and eReaders are eReaders!!!") but I don't know anymore. If you're someone who will tinker with your Remarkable (or PineNote), I seriously recommend trying an iPad. The Remarkable still wins for distraction-free work in stock form, but if you're one to tinker for utility, the utility is just there with the iPad, and doesn't sacrifice that much in the writing department
- feanaro 5y ago
  You've described why iPad doesn't suck terribly compared to the Remarkable but I didn't see you mention any of its advantages. Are there any?

filleokus 5y ago

> The 10.1 inch, 3:4 panel has a resolution of 1404×1872 (227 DPI), can display 16 levels of grayscale and is capable of a 60hz refresh rate 60 hz!? This + some paired keyboard + wifi-tethering + SSH (or even a remote session with VS Code!?) would probably be an awesome code-while-in-the-sun-setup. Really excited to see where this ends up.

solarkraft 5y ago
The 60Hz must be a mistake. That type of rate plain isn’t possible with e-ink.
- green7ea 5y ago
  I think so too but if the 60Hz is not a mistake, it will change my life. I hope it's not ;-)
  - DennisAleynikov 5y ago
    at 60hz, an electro phoretic display (EPD) or eink will start to degrade very rapidly and consume more power than even a bright OLED panel will. Eink is efficient only when you are NOT refreshing the screen constantly as it persists the last image drawn to screen, but if you wanna do any kind of scrolling, zooming etc, just use another kind of display tech.
    - mdp2021 5y ago
      > degrade very rapidly E-Ink displays were declared having a lifespan of 10 million switches per dot: you would have to do a study about how often the average pixel is changed, but if that value were 5s, the lifespan would be "five years of short week 9-to-5" - that is not bad. I am not sure if A2 mode or Greyscale Update with frequent dot switching is a stress that makes the dots degrade faster (not simply "decrease the life count going towards the max", but "decreasing the max"). I supposed not dramatically.
      - 5y ago

solarkraft 5y ago

I’m a bit underwhelmed by the price. This costs as much as the current-gen Remarkable, with more power, but likely worse build quality and software and only slightly higher hackability. That said I’m still excited for cool e-ink applications, like finally an optimized browser. Also: Competition to those Onyx devices with Android apps running through WayDroid (should be possible on the Remarkable, but I haven’t seen anyone try it). … which raises an interesting point. Will these things come with a working Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) for modern Wayland compositors to run?

rjsw 5y ago
Build quality has been good for all the Pine64 products that I own.
rich_sasha 5y ago
Looks cheaper than remarkable. For me (UK) it is £399 + £99 for a pen (!) which is in fact a consumable. If I want a book-cover type thing, that’s another £99. And it’s GBP not USD. So that’s probably altogether about 50% cheaper? I love the idea of remarkable, but cant justify £600 spend on a better notebook.
- chrismorgan 5y ago
  > £99 for a pen (!) which is in fact a consumable. The pen tips are consumables, the pen itself isn’t.
  - rich_sasha 5y ago
    Ah that I missed, good to know.
- bodge5000 5y ago
  The supernote may be of interest, the pen nibs don't need replacing. No idea how it compares to the RM2, a lot of people seem to rate it favourably but very few people have owned both so I don't know if thats just buy in hype. Theres a few youtube comparisons, but I have no intention of watching a 45 minute video that will end with "its up to you".

danShumway 5y ago

Oh, this is exciting. The performance and latency is a huge variable though. For a lot of these experimental hacker-friendly devices, I'm willing to tolerate a lot of compromises. Even here, the software, the out-of-the-box experience isn't really that important to me. Arguably, you can get away with even more compromise on a device like this than on something like the Pinephone. But it has to have amazing pen performance, or it's just not worth working with. Everything else except that is either fixable or something that probably isn't getting in the way of the core point of the device. IMO Remarkable got this right -- their software support is by many metrics quite bad (although I guess it's slowly started to improve). Their device handles PDFs kind of poorly from what I can tell. It's expensive. The interface seems slower and more laggy than many other EReaders. But none of that really matters, what matters is they have arguably the best pen latency and physical texturing on the E-ink market, and that writing on the device feels good. So the same thing applies here: the price seems completely reasonable to me, I have no issues with a $400 price tag. I'd pay $600, the price isn't the issue. But I need to see videos and testimonial that the pen latency isn't just "acceptable", but that it's really good. Otherwise it's not even worth $100. Writing experience is one of those things where once you get used to a lack of latency/offset, and used to a more accurate feel, it gets progressively harder and harder to go back to anything that's worse.

tadfisher 5y ago
The thing is, the ReMarkable isn't doing anything special hardware-wise to achieve that latency, as they're based on NXP reference designs with the same integrated EPD every other E-ink device is using (besides the Android-based devices, of course). The magic is essentially that they have nothing running on the device except a Qt app which writes directly to the framebuffer, and they have an extremely simplified framebuffer driver that allows the Qt app to implement the complex parts of updating an E-ink screen in userspace. The Wacom input is standard, the other kernel bits are standard, and they're even running systemd.
- danShumway 5y ago
  That's really positive if that's the case -- I was under the impression that some of this had to do with the hardware itself. At the very least though, aren't they are doing some special stuff with how they mount the screen and where they're sourcing their plastic texture cover from? I thought that offset was one of the big reasons they didn't have a backlight -- which the Pinenote will have I think. But this makes me feel a lot more confident about the PineNote if most of the latency at least comes down to framebuffer access.

megous 5y ago

Seeing cypress touch controller used in PineNote... Mainline cyttsp4 driver is buggy, incomplete, sucks and there are no docs for the touch controller. You can't even do calibration with the mainline driver, which is necessary to have a usable touchscreen. The vendor dropped the ball on that driver right after getting it mainline years ago - they didn't touch it ever since. It doesn't even support device tree. So there's gonna be some pain, for whoever will want to get that thing working mainline.

Klasiaster 5y ago
Choosing HW components which are not supported in mainline Linux or don't even have an upstreamable driver ready is the main criticism I have, too. I wish there was a way to have the hardware designed so that is works from day one with a recent Linux kernel instead of the mess with the PinePhone: the WiFi driver is of such a bad quality that it's not upstreamed, and of course totally buggy. Also, a similar situation can also be found with the device firmware: both the USB controller and the modem don't have a good vendor firmware and the community needs to debug this stuff - I wish only known-to-be-working components get selected in the first place.

dom96 5y ago

I am really amazed by the amount of products Pine64 is releasing. Anyone know how they are able to do this/what their story is?

megous 5y ago
They don't waste time with the software side of things. :)
paulcole 5y ago
Unrefined. Low build quality — remember when one of their product pages effectively said, “Don’t buy this if you can’t handle a couple dead pixels.” Their goal is to ship as much stuff as possible and then leave it up to the “community” to improve the software while the hardware is at-best third-rate. Result is a bunch of releases people want to like but never measure up. Best reviews you’ll see are like, “It’s passable for the price if you can live with…”
- commoner 5y ago
  I've found the PineTime to be extremely well-built and comparable to the original Fitbit Versa in terms of hardware quality. No dead pixels. For $27 plus shipping, it was an excellent deal. For those looking for a buying experience similar to traditional retail stores, Pine64 previously announced that they would launch online stores selling products with longer warranties and broader customer support at higher price points: https://www.pine64.org/2020/12/02/pine-store-community-pricing-online-retail-stores/ https://www.pine64.org/2020/12/02/pine-store-community-prici...

nabilhat 5y ago

> The PineNote is one of, if not the, most powerful e-ink device available on the market. It shares in much of the Quartz64’s pedigree, sporting the same RK3566 quad-core A55 SoC paired with 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM and 128GB eMMC flash storage. There's so much opportunity in the e-ink space just waiting for something to crack open. E-ink devices have felt so much like the TI-84 of the tablet world, or inkjet printers 25 years ago - overpriced and underpowered. There's a lot of work ahead for the Pine community to get to performance on par with existing e-ink tablets. Remarkable's setting the example now, which is frankly quite an achievement on two 1.2GHz cores with 1GB RAM. Pine's twice as many, ~50% faster cores, with 4x the RAM should help.

chrismorgan 5y ago
reMarkable 1 is 1GHz single-core with 512MB of RAM, and that’s entirely sufficient for what it’s primarily designed for, writing. PDF rendering is the main thing that can be slow, agonisingly so in some cases. I imagine that’s the main reason why they boosted reMarkable 2 to dual-core 1.2GHz and 1GB of RAM. (It wasn’t for things like startup time—https://old.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/jfgpqw/rm1_vs_rm2_boot_time_20sec_both_with_1_sec/ https://old.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/jfgpqw/rm... shows both 1 and 2 taking about 20 seconds, with 2 actually the slower by a second or so.) Quad-core 1.8–2GHz and 4GB of RAM is, if used fairly sensibly, massive overkill for most purposes e-paper has been used for so far, with image-heavy PDFs being the most likely exception (incidentally, I’m not sure if such rendering can be parallelised or not). It’s easily enough to run full desktop environment stuff. So yeah, it’ll be interesting to see what comes of it. Screen latency is certainly the key to the whole puzzle.
- ignaloidas 5y ago
  Since PineNote will have an actual GPU unlike reMarkable, I do expect that it will handle many PDF's without much trouble.
- schmorptron 5y ago
  They say they're deciding between plasma mobile and a customized full plasma as an interface so maybe hopefully they can actually provide a low-latency input layer which seems hard to do on Android.

123pie123 5y ago

I will probably buy this, but if the pine people are reading this, please please create a larger one

squarefoot 5y ago

This is really interesting. I was searching for something like that: big screen, no cloud or other services dependency, FOSS, nice price, etc. I just want to see its performance when dealing with old books and magazines that are 100% scanned graphics with no OCR, and/or PDFs with complex diagrams, schematics etc. Those usually bring to knees the less powerful readers and would probably require some serious CPU power along with more RAM and storage. It would also be nice if the software could sync with a NFS or SMB/CIFS local (or remote via VPN?) server plus local caching so users can have their entire library at hand without using USB keys or SD cards. Also please, add one 3.5 headphone jack if it's not already there (from the article it seems not). And the PinePhone keyboard also looks gorgeous!

chrismorgan 5y ago
A 3.5mm jack isn’t going to be easy to fit into a tablet that’s 7mm thick. It’s about a millimetre thicker than USB-C.
- red369 5y ago
  The 5th gen iPod Touch (and 6th and 7th) is only 6.1 mm thick, so while I don't think just because Apple can pull it off Pine64 should be able to also, it seems like there might physically be enough space. I was going to note that the 5th gen iPod Touch is from 2012, but then it feels like much of the miniaturisation progress since then has involved removing the jack. Agree that it's probably not easy though.

Aeolun 5y ago

I would kind of like Pine to focus on the supply chain for their current products. I’ve been looking to buy a pinebook for a while, but it’s been out of stock, or reserved for some kind of thing or another for a while now. That’s not an uncommon occurrence when landing on one of their product pages.

squarefoot 5y ago
If I recall correctly, their production has been hurt by the pandemic just when they were starting to deliver some of their most wanted products. Many businesses were hurt as well, but they're a lot smaller and will likely require more time. They're also selling small quantities at low prices, which translates in lower margins. That's probably the reason they cant expose themselves with the risks of big volume productions. To me it's just a matter of time, hopefully short.

chx 5y ago

Surprised no one mentions the Dasung not-eReader, a shockingly capable eInk device -- it doubles as a monitor, both the 7.8" and the 10.3" sized version. It's very expensive though :( I wonder whether the PineNote could add a video input as well...

Nerada 5y ago

Does anyone know if this will support encryption at rest?

fsflover 5y ago
Very likely, at some point. It runs regular Linux.

mixmastamyk 5y ago

I ordered the pine phone after the apple news broke last week. They demand a phone number to ship it, which is a reason why I’m buying. They have a while to go, unfortunately.

Causality1 5y ago

DHL sent all PinePhones to NZ, so we had to reship all orders (sorry for the delay) DHL is the worst shipper I have ever used and the only thing they're good for is pissing off your customers. The savings aren't worth it when you start being sent videos of them bending cardboard poster tubes in half so they can shove them into mailboxes.

hackshack 5y ago

Long time e-ink hacker. This is cheerful news. I'm a paper-fiend and adore my reMarkable 2 as a paper replacement. But let's get down to brass tacks. Points to the PineNote vs. reMarkable 2: 1. PineNote has 128GB storage whereas RM2 has 8GB. 2. PineNote has frontlit eink display. RM2 has no illumination. (This is a big one.) 3. PineNote has speakers + mic. RM2 does not. Points to the RM2 vs. PineNote: 1. reMarkable 2 is 4.7mm thin vs. PineNote "just over 7mm thick." I know it sounds like "spec wars," but this is a big deal, to me at least. My dream is an electronic index card, bendable and everything. 7mm is... smartphone and iPad territory. It's not bad, but it's not great. The promise of e-ink is that it is gloriously thin, like 65lb cardstock. 2. reMarkable 2 has the nice frosted tempered glass back. PineNote has plastic back with what looks like a... generous taper to squeeze the 7mm in. 3. Subjective, but the PineNote puts the pen at the top. I think the emergent universal style of magnetically docking the pen on the side is better. It's a little more friendly for left-handed users as they can always flip the pad and reorient it in software. With the pen at the top, now they have to reach for the bottom. If you rest the pad in your lap, now the pen becomes disconnected. The reMarkable software is very good, albeit closed. I have struggled to build a decent e-ink focused desktop environment on my hacked Kindle. Pine will require a strong effort to build a first-class UX. All said, as a hacker, I'd go for the PineNote in a heartbeat. e-ink tablets are still somewhat future tech, so Joe and Jane Consumer would be better served by an iPad, or reMarkable 2 if they're feeling brave. The UX makes (and breaks) it. I won't go into the iPad vs. eink discussion except to say I have an iPad Pro + Pencil for non-handwriting tasks. Writing on glass is fatiguing. I will check out the screen covers that give more paper tooth. It would be great to see aggressive optimization on thinness in the next generation. Things can be open, and thin. If you're new to the e-ink tablet scene, these price points are unbelievable compared with the state of the art 10-15 years ago. Don't think of them as iPads or Surfaces. It's different tech, not for everyone. But if you're a handwriter or have your nose in PDFs all day, it's a game-changer.

2Gkashmiri 5y ago

so i want to know how much of this price is licensing costs? suppose today the e-ink patent goes public, is free to use, how much of a price delta can we see?

robinsoh 5y ago
> so i want to know how much of this price is licensing costs? suppose today the e-ink patent goes public, is free to use, how much of a price delta can we see? What licensing cost? Who is licensing what from E Ink? What patent? Please be specific. I work in the display industry. See my comment history for how many times I've asked this question and also have a look at the replies people give. So far, I've never found a satisfying answer. I'm starting to think people who say this stuff don't actually have a clue about the display industry, or are unwilling to acknowledge things like how volume is the main determinant of price in the industry today.
- traverseda 5y ago
  It's purportedly hard to get real information because of various non-disclosure agreements. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143407 Goes over it in more depth. If such NDA's exist it would be hard to tell, but certainly we can see various things that suggest that those NDAs are real. Why do you think e-ink displays are so much more expensive than equivalent LCD/OLD displays? Technology wise they're very similar, and enough e-ink displays have been shipped that we should have started to see diminishing returns on the economics of scale.
  - robinsoh 5y ago
    > Goes over it in more depth. It does not. You can see in that thread, I had asked there as well and the throwaway account never responded to me. I'm pretty sure it is fake as that narrative describes things like "strongarms the display manufacturers and the users of their displays" which would cause uproar in the display industry and all of us would have heard of it. > Why do you think e-ink displays are so much more expensive than equivalent LCD/OLD displays? Volume. Volume. Volume. The typical MOQ for an LCD order would be in the tens of millions of units per quarter. Even the highest volume E Ink panel presumably the one in Kindle, would be at best several million a year. > Technology wise they're very similar No, they are not. Electrophoretic displays are very different than LCDs which are again very different than OLED. > enough e-ink displays have been shipped that we should have started to see diminishing returns on the economics of scale. In order to reach lower prices, you have to reach higher volumes so that you get closer to the bare materials cost. If you're only selling a few million displays per year, you'll never achieve sufficient volume to justify building a fully custom production line in order to reach the asymptote of materials cost.

rigmarole 5y ago

Just to point out that this isn't ready as a consumer device quite yet. This is from down the page: > We’re seeing a lot of excitement and “shut up and take my money, I’ll throw out my other e-ink devices tomorrow!” responses to this post, but remember that we are a community of developers first and foremost. If you’re looking to buy a PineNote in the first batch, you must expect to write software for it, not to write notes on it. The software shipping from the factory for the first batch will not be suitable for taking notes, reading e-books, or writing your dissertation. It may not even boot to a graphical environment. However, we are excited for what you’ll create with this device and we’re ready to take the journey with you. We’ll be posting more updates on software progress on this blog as they come in.

armchairhacker 5y ago

$399 I really wish there was a basic, cheap e-ink tablet on the market. Basic and cheap. We have basic but not cheap. AFAIK e-ink isn’t pricey to make, it’s just that the E-ink company is a monopoly so they jack up the price. Which is a shame, because i would buy an e-ink if they weren’t so expensive.

ShakataGaNai 5y ago
Monopoly and patents, I believe. So yes, it's technically not expensive to make, but licensing. R&D costs money, take that to mean what you want. Unfortunately the laws in our world have not caught up with technology changes.
- robinsoh 5y ago
  > Monopoly and patents, I believe. So yes, it's technically not expensive to make, but licensing. R&D costs money, take that to mean what you want. Unfortunately the laws in our world have not caught up with technology changes. What monopoly? There's no monopoly on bistable displays or even electrophoretic displays. What patents? Please try to be specific. I work in the display industry. The only place I hear stuff like what you're saying is on HN, which previously got picked up by Boing Boing and then blogs and then comments on HN which referenced those blogs. Surely, if this patent hell or monopoly hell was true we would have heard about it. Surely I would have heard about this problem from colleagues, coworkers or even gossip at conferences. Could you elaborate on your claim ? Please see my comment history to see why I keep asking about this. Hopefully this time I can get a positive data point where I can learn something unlike what I got the last time I tried to ask about this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27980391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27980391
  - tadfisher 5y ago
    What is unsatisfactory about the patents that other commenters have repeatedly pointed out to you, and that obviously cover electrophoretic display technologies and manufacturing methods? Perhaps these are avoidable, but could you elaborate how, as someone who works in the display industry? For reference, here are a few more, easily found via Google Patents: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9792861B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US9792861B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US9792862B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US9792862B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7050040B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7050040B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US8724212B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US8724212B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US8643939B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US8643939B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US9778538B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US9778538B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7259744B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7259744B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7256765B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7256765B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7548366B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7548366B2/en