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Tablets

Star Labs StarLite

5owners with an opinion
40%of verdicts positive
2/2positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and reliability; criticized for comfort and battery.

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What owners wrote

Doesn’t like itOwned 1.5 years
Exactly. I don't care how it's built I care that it survives some daily use that is not sitting on a desk. My job many years ago provided me a Lenovo x220. I used to haul that thing from NJ to Arkansas with me twice a year and all over. It was not pretty but it literally took anything I could give it. My current M1 MacBook Air goes with me on my bicycle daily, goes camping and goes everywhere with no issues. My Starlabs linux "star lite" laptop had screws back out of it the first time I took it on my bicycle. After replacing screws over and over and eventually taping them in place to avoid the hassle the display stopped working. After fixing the cable for this eventually my keyboard began acting up and now the machine is just a desktop. Mind you this was in about 1.5 years.
Likes it
Naive twenty something (back then) here. The latter half of the 1900s changed so drastically that yeah... a Star Trek like utopia seemed plausible, if not inevitable. It wasn't until the post-9/11 mobile revolution and normies embracing the internet (late 2000s) that things took a hard turn for the worse. I was honestly surprised (shouldn't have been), and now sorry I didn't do anything to reverse the trend. We need a well-capitalized organization to keep general-purpose computing alive, along with privacy, security, and autonomy. There are lots of little organizations of course, but they are unfocused and operate like ants in a realm dominated by BigTech giants. ---- Reply to below, I can no longer post for the next hour: ---- Right. Unfortunately I don't have the capital, but would love to work on the problem... even for free/cheap in my spare time. And will. For example, been testing the new Starlite tablet with Phosh... and it is soooo close! I'm about to start learning how to develop for it. But it would go faster if say... starlabs, purism, system76, pine, riscv companies, FLOSS peeps would collaborate more effectively. They do to some extent, but don't often push in the same direction. One major problem is the quality of documentation of interfaces. One of those boring things most don't want to do without a paycheck. Despite decades of experience with Linux I don't (yet) know where to start with wayland, dbus, gstreamer, gtk, etc. A book that pulled all th…
Doesn’t like it
I bought one of those for this reason. I really like starlabs and want to support them, but the keyboard cover for that device is .. not great. If it had a keyboard similar to the apple ipad keyboard (the expensive one with backlighting - I forget their name for it), the starlite would be a much more compelling device. At this point mine just sits in a desk drawer and may find its way to eBay.
Doesn’t like it
It's really unfortunate because other then that it's still a great laptop. 4k screen with touch, just enough CPU and RAM for browsing, some coding/ssh terminals and more. I bought a StarLite Mk 5 [1] to replace the Dell laptop, and regret it so far. Battery life isn't anywhere near promised and since I primarily use the laptop sitting on a couch it's useless because of the magnetic keyboard/being a tablet. It's my own fault for buying it, I should have cancelled the order, and I don't think I can return it even if it's basically brand new unused in the box it came in. [1] https://no.starlabs.systems/pages/starlite?shpxid=61ecd87f-f...
Likes itHasn’t owned it
Not surprising. These phones were out of date when they debuted and not updated, in like five years? I played with one for a bit but then mobian trixie updates bricked it twice and I gave up. Only wanted it to be on par with my old iPhone 6s, but it never achieved that. Star labs makes a great Linux tablet, the starlite, so it is near possible to make a decent floss phone these days.