Pine64 announces open tablet: PineTab 2
Pine64's last update of 2022 brings word of a new version of its PineTab FOSS-driven tablet after chip shortages effectively killed the first generation.
As per the December update from the Hong Kong kit vendor, the PineTab is officially dead. As we mentioned a year ago, the original PineTab was the larger sibling of Pine64's PinePhone Pro FOSS-driven smartphone. The company says:
PineTab's death was, in some part, a choice on our part as decisions were made to allocate resources to secure PinePhone's availability throughout late 2020 and early 2021.
Component supplies gradually improved this year, and the PineBook Pro laptop resumed shipping back in August, although in limited numbers. The PinePhone Pro is also trickling out. A recent tweet from Adam Pigg, a developer of Jolla's Sailfish Linux-based phone OS, shows a PinePhone Pro in its optional keyboard case, working with an unfinished port of Sailfish. Another tweet this month shows one running Kali Linux. The hardware is out there – we saw one of this pairing at last month's Ubuntu Summit, although we were sadly unable to ask the owner about it.
Now that the spec of the PineTab tablet is looking rather dated, the company is giving up on it and moving straight on to a second-generation device. This will use the same Rockchip RK3566 SoC as the company's Quartz64b single-board computer and the PineBook Pro laptop. This means a 2GHz quad-core Arm Cortex-A55. There will be two models, one with 4GB RAM and 64GB flash, and a higher-end one with 8GB/128GB. The device will include both a 2MP forward-facing camera and a 5MP rearward-facing one, a microSD slot, and a headphone socket. The device will be 9mm thick.