The PineNote is an e-ink notebook that runs Linux

Related discussion here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28190756" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28190756</a>

Didn&#x27;t we discuss this at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28190756" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28190756</a> ?

Let me just say that the Remarkable also runs linux.<p>Not only that, but I&#x27;ve been blown away by the ongoing results from the team at Remarkable. I only have the Remarkable 1 but they continue to ship updates for it, and these updates are often really substantive with sometimes profound new features. Their cloud service is free, no aggravating subscription stuff and even though they have the remarkable 2 now, they continue to kill it with the updates to improve my experience with the remarkable 1. They, as of right now, have my undying loyalty and appear to be a truly customer focused company. I&#x27;d love to buy their entire team a couple beers.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong, I love pine64 too, but they&#x27;re way more oriented to us hacker types than ordinary people and I don&#x27;t want to have to hack together a functioning device with everything I own, though I think they&#x27;re doong good work none-the-less.

I own several of the Pine devices. They are all alpha in different ways but that&#x27;s fine, I&#x27;m paying for the future.<p>The thing that worries me is that they are launching a lot of products. They are all adjacent in some ways.<p>But, should I as a customer, or Pine as a company, be worried about the cost of supporting all these different kinds of devices?<p>I recall reading a long time ago that Google intentionally offers products where they can get away without offering support from a real person. That&#x27;s obviously not true anymore but many of their products are entirely self supported (or GTFO...). The obvioys reason is that support is so incredibly costly and you never recoup a penny of that cost because it only happens after the purchase is made in most cases.<p>Is this the true brilliance of Pine, that they&#x27;ve created a community of people around them that are willing to help get all these products to the next level and they can avoid this costly facet of any organization? Or, is this a fatal mistake that will kill Pine?<p>I&#x27;m super excited about all their products and some of them will undoubtedly sit in my closet after the initial use. But, is that ok for the second wave of users who will demand something better?

I have a Boox Note Air--it runs Android, and can do cool stuff to apps to make them work better on e-ink (mostly tweaking the contrast).<p>It&#x27;s still kind of slow in practice, like all e-ink. Page turns will take longer than a tablet or of course a book.<p>It comes with a stylus, but the only note-taking app that works well with it is the built-in one, which is not great though at least it can sync your notes off the device. But standard Android apps that support pen input are unusable.<p>If you want to read PDFs on an e-ink screen, I think this is probably the best option. You need a much larger screen than Kindles have of course, and the Android ecosystem has some ok apps for PDFs and comics (the Boox has a decent PDF reader but I&#x27;d suggest using a different app that syncs).<p>When it comes down to it, though, I&#x27;ve never really been happy with e-ink. Tablets are just so much faster and more versatile, and for reading in the sun and so forth I&#x27;d rather just take a book.

This reminds me of another HN thread today about ncurses and text based UIs. Writing software for e-ink displays could be an efficient interface hybrid that included Ncurses-like navigation.<p>From a general SaaS product perspective, your product comes down to the value of the data you provide, and the best possible user experience is in fact an API (imo), which customers integrate into their own systems, and it just sticks there and generates revenue. If you can develop a SaaS that works on an e-ink display, that&#x27;s valuable data. It&#x27;s choosing and solving for an arbitrary constraint, which is inferior to just finding out what people want and making it for them, but it requires us to build a meaningful tool instead of just another dazzling representation. In terms of refining ideas, that it should work in lynx could be an interesting enhancment to the creative process.

Calling it a notebook is a bit of a stretch. It doesn&#x27;t take notes.<p><i>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 [...]</i><p>Edit: It looks like tuxphones is the one calling it a notebook. Pine 64 never calls it a notebook on their site. It&#x27;s named PineNote, but it&#x27;s marketed as an &quot;e-ink device&quot; that may be a non-functional prototype on delivery. From their press release: <i>It may not even boot to a graphical environment.</i>

It’s worth noting that this is a bit more powerful than Pine64’s other hardware releases, in part because it’s using the same base chipset as its Quartz64 SBC, released earlier this year: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.pine64.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Quartz64" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.pine64.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Quartz64</a>

I&#x27;ve never been interested in hardware, but have recently become a Pine64 fanboy.<p>I daily drive Pinephone, Pinetime, and am keen to get my hands on the PineNote.<p>More open hardware please! :)

Interesting. As an aside the Remarkable runs Linux too and it&#x27;s somewhat hackable, but its main application is closed source, as is the drawing of the screen (accomplished with temperature dependent waveforms via software).<p>Its hardware specs are much worse but it&#x27;s thinner at 4.7 mm.<p>I appreciate this new product but if it were dependent on me I would have invested in color eInk instead of powerful CPU with an NPU. I guess the build on the community providing a nice environment and handwriting recognition (otherwise I cannot explain the NPU)

Cool. I just dream someone will also create a DE and apps designed specifically for e-ink, on the principle that no piece of screen should be re-drawn unless it actually is to show (or hide) some [important] updated information.

So does the Kindle. I like the idea of a &quot;freer&quot; device but it is worth note to any current Kindle user that with a jailbreak you can get the same Linux shell.

I was hoping for an affordable competitor to the Remarkable, but seems like it is just a competitor not necessarily affordable like a lot of the other Pine products. Not to say it won&#x27;t be great or it is a bad thing, but had my hopes up when I saw the title. I cannot justify spending that amount for that type of product. Again not a knock as it is nice to see them get into this market just not what I thought when I originally saw that title.

Is the input lag in par with other e-ink notebooks?

Will this have a OneNote client? That missing feature makes the remarkable a nonstarter for me and the fact they still don&#x27;t seem interested in adding one baffles me.<p>No I&#x27;m not interested in the &quot;just email it to yourself&quot; workflow. I want and need to be able to directly interact with OneNote.

Not sure from reading the post, but does it have a backlight? I love my Remarkable 2 to death, but the only thing that bugs me is I cannot read something at night when the lights are off. A backlight will make it perfect.

And still has zero actual videos of the device in action, which makes it really hard to get excited about it rather than cautiously apprehensive.<p>$400 might be cheap compared to, say, a remarkable2, but not if the display turns out to be flat-out mediocre. Then that&#x27;s $400 better spent on &quot;saving up for a remarkable2&quot;.