I'm very pleased with Pine64 and I think they're doing a tremendous job of pushing open hardware and doing it right, and I am a frequent buyer and occasional contributor to various pine-adjacent projects accordingly. But it really disappoints me that they aren't committed to free (as in freedom) platforms. I die a little bit every time I see them call you to join their Discord channel in these updates, or to follow them on Twitter, or post on their subreddit. Especially for a project in close collaboration with Linux distros, IRC and mailing lists are an important communication medium which is under-emphasized and under-utilized by Pine.<p>Pine seems to understand the value of free software within their phones, but why not without? It's very frustrating to know that a sizable fraction of their development discussions are being had on the other side of propriatary garden walls.
It's interesting how close PineNote is to Remarkable's product (maybe not given OEM whitelabeling). Given Remarkable's OS is a "purposely designed Linux-based operating system for low-latency digital paper displays" I wonder how long the Pine community will take to match software features?<p>Pine: 191.1 x 232.5 x 7.4 mm 438.0 g, 4/128 G, 4000 mAH<p>Rkbl: 187.0 x 246.0 x 4.7 mm 403.5 g, 1/008 G, 3000 mAh<p><a href="https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineNote" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineNote</a><p><a href="https://remarkable.com/" rel="nofollow">https://remarkable.com/</a>