Pinebook - 1st review

So I got the Pinebook 11 inch with arm 64 bits.....

And what can I say, I am amazed with the quality of the construction. 

Very good plastics, better than some chromebooks and cheap windows netbooks.

The mousepad is outstanding and work really nice.

The keyboard, only has one problem!! The right shift. Probably I will remap the shift to the "/" position. I use and abuse right shift (i rarely use the left one), so this is very important to me.

The screen is bright and sharp, the OS is Ubuntu Mate, nothing new...

The support is outstanding as usual in the Linux community.

There is a win/mac/linux tool to load images to sdcard and flash the computer, it works properly. 

So where does it fails.... Please remember that this computer is for early adopters and developers, so a lot of things don't work...

- in the 11" inch version there are some flickering - This is related to driver issues, it is being worked out. The Android image as per today does not have this issue. 

- Also in linux distro due to DRM support issues, videos like youtube and other are not working properly as they are being software rendered.

- the firefox shipped with is buggy - Alternative I found was to install Chromium. Best option so far. Check the Pinebook forum for this.

- sound was not working and there is a fix, it is related to driver issue

- Android image, looks like a good option if you want things done, however in my opinion is a waste a space in the screen, and it is not very optimized for laptop. I suggest to wait for a Remix OS release. The Remix OS exists in Pine64+, so sure it will be soon in the Pinebook.

- Brightness level inverted - just a minor bug, not major issue

- still wondering how to invert the mousepad scroolling, dconf-editor not working, synaptics driver not found in kernel, strange, will have to dig deeper.

Most of this bugs are solved almost daily and for sure more will come along, however the good communication with users<->developers results in a very good community work.

I will keep using this very nice computer, and with the help of all, I am sure that all the software problems will be solved. 

The basis (hardware) is strong and good, it is just the software that needs to be tweaked.