Lap up a Pinebook Pro at the Southwest Show

Don’t worry, you can clear the entire stock – mine’s already ordered!

This Saturday’s Southwest Show will be when anyone holding their breath in anticipation of the arrival of the Pinebook Pro running RISC OS can finally breath again: R-Comp will be bringing along a selection of the ARM-based laptops from PINE64 to the show, not just to show off, but for people to buy – along with a range of accessories.

Based around a Rockchip RK3399 (with RISC OS using one of its 1.8GHz Cortex A72 cores) the machine benefits from a 14″ 1920x1080p IPS display, 4GB RAM, 64GB of internal (eMMC) storage, a micro-SD slot, connectivity via two USB 2/3 ports and one USB C, and more besides.

The port of RISC OS to the machine has been underway for a while, with R-Comp demonstrating and talking about it at some recent events, and it is finally here. Features of the port (as well as your favourite OS running on a very fast ARM-based laptop) include battery management, screen brightness control (with automatic dimming when the computer is idle), password security, and much more.

The machine will be available on Saturday in two main flavours – a purely RISC OS machine, or one that can be booted into either RISC OS or Linux – for £499.00 including VAT.

The company will also have a range of accessories available, including carry cases – and one item in particular that people who used the previous (non-Pro) Pinebook requested most: A means to connect the computer to an external display, be that a monitor (to aid working at a desk) or a projector (for demonstrations).

An adaptor will be available that provides VGA, HDMI, and DVI connections. It doesn’t require an external power source, so can easily be kept in your bag and pulled out whenever and wherever it’s needed.

R-Comp notes that there is a performance penalty to using this adaptor, with notable lag when dragging windows around, for example – as such, they don’t consider it an ideal ‘permanent’ solution. However, with the video driver it’s based on produced by Jeffrey Lee, the features it offers when connecting to an external display include automatic screen dimming, control over the internal graphics architecture (which improves stability when using the external GPU), a wide range of screen modes, and performance enhancing link optimisation.

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