PINE64 Announces a Surprise New PineTab Tablet, and a Less-Welcome Star64 SBC Delay

Open hardware specialist PINE64 has announced a new PineTab tablet, imaginatively called the PineTab2, to replace the long out-of-stock original — though this welcome news is joined by a delay to the upcoming Star64 RISC-V single-board computer.

"The original PineTab was conceived alongside the PinePhone in early 2018 at a small pub in Brussels, and a little less than two years later the PinePhone and PineTab became available for order," Lukasz Erecinski recalls. "There is no need for me to recap how the pandemic unfolded, what effect it had on production in mainland China or explain the hardships businesses had to endure as a consequence of this, but suffice to say that the original PineTab was a victim of COVID and its fallout. In all fairness I should also make it clear that 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."

With component shortages beginning to ease, PINE64 was looking at bringing the PineTab back — but rather than simply restarting production opted to redesign the device around a new system-on-chip, the Rockchip RK3566. "But the PineTab2 is much more than a spec-bumped version of the original," Erecinski promises. "It is a complete physical redesign: you're getting a metal chassis that is very sturdy while also being easy to disassemble for upgrades, maintenance, and repair. Taking the PineTab2 apart is as simple as undoing a set of snap-tabs and removing the metal back chassis."

Moving back to the specifications, PINE64 aims to launch the PineTab2 in two variants: one with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of eMMC storage, and one with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of eMMC storage. Both will use the Rockchip RK3566, which gives the machine four Arm Cortex-A55 cores running at up to 2GHz, an Arm Mali G52-2EE graphics processor, and a neural network coprocessor offering 1 trillion operations per second (TOPS) at INT8 precision.

Elsewhere on the tablet is a pair of USB Type-C ports, one USB 3.0 and the other offering USB 2.0 connectivity plus doubling as a charging port, a dedicated micro-HDMI port for video, and a front-facing two megapixel camera and a rear-facing five megapixel camera. Inside is a surprise for hackers: an M.2 PCI Express connector, though Erecinski warns that "I wouldn't expect most NVMe SSDs to fit inside the chassis." As before, the tablet will come bundled with a keyboard, which can be removed at any time.

While Erecinski confirmed plans to release the PineTab2 "sometime after the Chinese New Year" at an as-yet unconfirmed price point, he also offered some less welcome news: a delay to the Star64 RISC-V single-board computer, which is to serve as competition to StarFive's VisionFive 2.

"The Pine Store is still very intent on releasing the board prior to the Chinese New Year (which starts on January 22) but a firm release date isn’t known as of yet," Erecinski says. "At this point the board is undergoing an additional review process and, due to various external reasons, it is hard to predict with complete certainty when the review will be finished. I’ll update you on social media when more information is available."

More details, along with updates on the recently-launched Ox64, "one of if not the fastest-selling PINE64 SBC," Erecinski claims, are available on the PINE64 website.