That's what a LINUX TABLET is supposed to look like! FydeTab Duo

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#linux #tablet #fydetab

00:00 Intro
00:29 Sponsor: AlmaLinux & TuxCare support services
01:15 Hardware and Build Quality
04:33 Accessories: turn it into a Surface clone
06:16 FydeOS: Android apps + Linux apps + Webapps!
10:06 Installing Linux on it
11:46 Is this tablet any good?
13:44 Sponsor: Get a laptop or desktop that runs Linux!
14:51 Support the channel

The tablet is 12.3 inches, with a QHD display, at a resolution of 2560 by 1600, so 16:10. It’s a heavy boy, at 750 grams, and 1.3kg when you attach the kickstand and the keyboard.

The FydeTab is powered by a RockChip 3588S8, which is an 8 core ARM CPU, with 4 performance cores, and 4 efficiency cores, running at 2.4Ghz and 1.8ghz respectively. It’s coupled with a mali G610 GPU, which is also pretty decent, as we’ll see in this video.

It has 8GB of DDR4 RAM, and 128Gigs of eMMC memory.

On top of that, you get a nice aluminium build, with a headphone jack, a USB C port that supports fast charging and displayport, and you get a slot for a micro SD card to expand the storage, and for a nanoSIM card if you want to use a cellular connection.

You also get wifi 6 and bluetooth 4.2. It embarks a 42Wh battery, and the battery life is definitely quite impressive, with 10 hours of youtube videos playing in a loop over wifi at 50% brightness.

You also get a power button, which doubles as a fingerprint scanner, and a volume rocker.

The FydeTab Duo comes with everything you need to turn it into a microsoft surface form factor: a magnetically attached back that has a kickstand, with some strong magnets, and a keyboard that uses pogo pins and charges off the tablet’s battery. My review unit came in red, but there will be a gray option as well. Both have a felt like exterior, and a soft touch plastic face where it touches the tablet. The kickstand feels super sturdy, with a solid hinge, but I wish it could be angled more, so you could use the tablet more flat, for drawing or annotating.

You also get a stylus with it, which uses AAAA batteries, and also works really well, with a low latency. It’s not on par with an apple pencil or a samsung s pen, but it’s really not bad at all.

The FydeTab Duo runs FydeOS out of the box, which is a degoogled version of Chrome OS.

The Fyde account thing felt weird to me, especially when they asked me to use telegram to verify my phone number, instead of just sending an SMS, so I went for the local account.

It’s much better than ChromeOS Flex, notably because it has Android app support baked in, with the ability to add Google apps in one click from their store, with full play store access.

Android apps ran pretty well for me, with decent performance, although there is an issue with video playback: anything that is supposed to play video, just won’t. Other applications worked well, I installed Alto’s Odysee to try out how a game would run, and it performed perfectly.

It can also run Linux apps in a container, that you can also install in one click from the developer options, and the performance there is also decent, although much lower than what you’d get on a native Linux install.

Of course, the real appeal of this thing, will be to run a full blown linux distro on it, and you can! The booloader is open, and you can download images for FydeOS, openFyde, the Android open source project, and Debian 11. I’d expect that if this device succeeds, more options will be available as well.

I went for Debian 11, and it runs pretty well! The experience feels alright, the keyboard, display, bluetooth and wifi, suspend and resume work, gpu acceleration does as well, and battery life isn’t too shabby either, although it’s worse than in the default FydeOS, lasting for 7 hours in a youtube playback test. The touchscreen doesn’t work though, which is a bummer, and the default Debian image is in Chinese, and I couldn’t figure out how to change the language, which made it reallllly hard to use. It’s not a bad experience, although it’s obviously early days.