Sunday, April 30, 2017

Pinebook - 2nd review - Android and mini Howto

The Pinebook ships with BSP Linux, that I wrote some lines about, but another official distribution (Operating System) available is Android 6.0.

This Android can easialy be installed using the Pine 64 installer tool. Everything you need is a micro SD card and and adapter or a card reader that supports micro sd in the computer you are doing this.

This tool is available for download for MacOs, Windows and Linux. You simply select what is the computer/board you want to install to, and the operating system selected. after that you select the card, you wait a bit, and voila. 

 When the creation of the image is complete, you just have to grab the micro SD and drop it in the Pinebook. Be aware that all you have in the Pinebook will be erased. The name of the image is very clear ..sd2emmc....

Push the on Button, you will see a black screen and green progress bar, and when in the top left corner you see CARD OK, it means the process is over, remove the card and reboot.

The Android presented is fairly ok, and everything works out of the box, no major issues, with the exception of the mouse pad, that is harder to work with, maybe related to some software configurations from Android.

I am writing this post in it, without any issues, running Spotify with headphones at same time.

The rest all you can expect from Android is working properly, just throw apps at it from the market.

As a final performance test, I installed Antutu Benchmark tool to see what was happening in this system. 

Final result 22668.
3D: 676
UX: 10705
CPU: 9346
RAM: 1941

The Pinebook community is already working on the newer versions of Android 7.1, and it is also expectable, in similarity to Pine64 board that more operating systems will be officially released and available through the installer tool, such as Remix OS, Debian, Armbian, etc...

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