I feel like it’s almost too generic to be useful. All the “standard” attachments make it a thing that already exists (and those things are usually much stable and supported). If they get enough 3rd party attention prior to launch, that could change.
I wish they would have spent the time and effort just committing to the smartphone idea. Linux and the Linux community could greatly benefit from more open source smartphone devices.
Cool emulation machine and design, even if it isn’t the most practical thing ever.
I see a lot of negativity in the comments. And yeah, this thing probably isn’t something I’m going to get, but at least they are trying something that isn’t a generic rectangle of glass like all the others. I miss the days of fun gadgets.
Fun useful gadgets. A gadget for the sake of a gadget is just another word for “e-waste”.
Yeah I’m just tired of seeing projects like this get abandoned quickly
I get it, but a gentle reminder, often the best way for society to have an awesome projects is to have a lot of projects.
Fair point
I like the generic rectangle block of glass.
Don’t understand why they insist on a physical keyboard.I much prefer physical keyboards and find it difficult to use touchscreen, so a mobile, qwerty keyboard sounds great to me.
What phones u guys been using for the last 15 years? I haven’t seen slide out keyboards for about that long
Nokia 105, Wish it had qwerty though.
i am personally sick of shiny rectangles. physical keyboards are the buttons on your cars dash instead of the shiny rectangle on your car’s dash.
Cars’ buttons need to be used while preferably not looking at them, that’s a pretty different situation to a smartphone
Being able to use a keyboard without looking at it is a good thing.
Only thing that makes it “different situation” for smartphone is that they just don’t have the keyboards. (And some of us kinda accepted that…)
Also, I can somewhat type eyes-free on a smartphone keyboard because of the combination of autocorrect and my fingers remembering where the touch points are relative to the screen
Well that looks cool. I just hope I would have use for such device.
I wonder how they plan to keep updating this Mechanix OS after initial sales slow down
It’s going to be just like my pocket chip and die quickly after in terms of software support. Where I had to run my own hacks and also run archive debian repositories for the hardware itself only for the flash to die a year afterwards. I can say though it was the coolest device I had and hacking it was really neat especially with the UI and scaling apps on the device.
That looks amazing.
… For 2008.
2008 was awesome!
Let’s make 2025 2008 again!
Being on Lemmy sometimes makes me feel like everyone here is old. Y’all talking about the years that I was born in as if it was like yesterday.
Worry not: in 20 years’ time people born in 2028 will all pretty much look like kids to you.
(They are, that’s why everyone gets bent out of shape when boomers are criticized here)
I doubt there are a lot of boomers here
Having been here since July of last year, there definitely are. The demographics skew towards older tech bro types, in my experience.
You were born in multiple years?
I’d rather not give my birth year in a public post. I was just keeping it vague.
(It’s not 2008 btw)
I wonder who this is made for?
The article calls it a “smartphone sized pocket computer”, but that describes smartphones too; they already are pocket computers. And they’ve had decades of design and development behind them.
So… This device has a tiny touchscreen, and a keyboard, rather than having the whole thing being a touchscreen. So instead it has a modular bottom half… Which… Sounds like it’s trying to solve a problem that would’ve been a problem in like… The 90s, maybe, but has been solved by using… A touchscreen that can change the type of input it is flexibly, like smartphones do.
It can’t call, like a smartphone, despite being a smartphone sized device. It has USB A 2.0 sockets and an Ethernet socket… Which makes it once again sound incredibly out-dated, like a device found in a time capsule, because USB C is smaller and faster than USB A 2.0, and can potentially be used for damn near anything. Which includes connecting to the Internet.
Its battery looks very weak. Its CPU looks very weak. It has a tiny amount of RAM, and a tiny amount of storage. It is outclassed by any affordable, midrange smartphone, at nearly the same price too (if you avoid big brand names).
For people who like a concept more than practicality. There’s maybe a handful use cases that this specific device fits in that isn’t covered better by existing tech, but I guarantee if that thing actually gets kickstarted and arrives severely delayed in several years, it’ll show up in a couple YouTube videos with people sort of uncertain what to use it for, and in the vast majority of cases it’ll end up in some drawers after having been used a few hours tops.
Full-size usb, Ethernet and keyboard mean you can use it as a Linux computer, install arbitrary debian packages, run shell scripts, python scripts, and you don’t need any dongles. This is the differential factor. You can’t do the same on a smartphone, and it’s not supposed to be a smartphone. Why would you need a separate sim card when you can simply tether Internet from your phone?
I get that this device isn’t for you, but there are people who don’t want to write and maintain apps through apps stores and simply want to copy simple scripts into a small device they can have with them. It’s a niche market and good for them for trying to fill that niche.
I wonder what they use for charging port if not usb c…
You can do all that with USB C and a touch keyboard. There is no good reason under the sun to make a device that is this dated in concept.
Whatever the market is they’re trying to fill, it’ll be so extremely niche that this product is already a failure. It’s not the first time some kind of ultra niche product from kickstarter failed before launch because except for a small handful even cared.
How do you install utilities like
kubectland azure CLI on Android?I can do that and more on my Pinephone running Kali Nethunter. While it’s mostly a gimmick with awfull battery life, I’ve already used it a few times mostly in regards to wifi pentesting for my cyber-sec job, i.e when going to lunch onsite and you notice a new wifi AP you didn’t see when inside the office you’re working on.
And since it has an USB-C, I can simply plug in a dock with two USB-As, Ethernet, PD and HDMI, to turn it into a full-fledged Kali desktop.
Pinephone looks great and the keyboard case seems very ergonomic. Fo you use it as your daily driver?
I tried it like a year ago, maybe more, and it wasn’t ready for that. The battery life was awfull (which was a SW issue of the OS not being able to stand-by properly), and accepting calls wasn’t really reliable. It’s more of a gimmick and great as a side-phone, but I wouldn’t use it as a daily driver.
But the situation might’ve changed.
A little worried that with swapping those components like that, it’s trying to be too many things for too many different groups of people instead of one exact thing.
I think all I really want is something shaped like this with a keyboard, like an old Blackberry that could be used as a terminal.
A little worried that with swapping those components like that, it’s trying to be too many things for too many different groups of people instead of one exact thing.
Isn’t that exactly what made Raspberry Pis a massive hit? Being able to be so many different things for so many different groups of people, at a reasonable price point, maximizing the groups it appealed to?
Yeah, but raspberry handhelds are chonky at best.
Right, which is why I’m implying this could be a hit because it’s the right form factor aimed at a myriad of use-cases.
I agree that id like a nice handheld terminal, but dont a lot of people like handheld emulation consoles? Hell both of those sound great to me. I would totally get both the game pad and keyboard if i went for it.
My real concern is that it would be garbage and/or the company would fold and support would become non existent.
Maybe i just got burned by pocketchip
Still have my Pocket CHIP. I look at it sometimes and sigh, thinking about what could have been.
There are a couple resources around to bring it up to something approaching working on the internet, but not much, and not complete, last I checked.
Thing was great for playing terminal roguelikes, though.
Yep its one of the bigger issues. I wanted to get a uconsole, but ive heard the support is not the greatest. And the wait times are horrendous for the hardware.
Sorry, if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. If you can’t make this stuff at scale, no way you could sell it at $160 a unit.
While I hope I’m wrong, I agree this thing will go the way of most Kickstarters. It is interesting, but it will never have appeal outside of the hobby space, and the cash needed to get this thing off the ground will be immense.
Ooof. After having a pinephone, I know what 2 or 3GB of RAM can handle these days. Not much, really. Specially the moment you open the browser. I’m going to pass from any project that doesn’t attempt to at least get close to this decade’s standards.
Website currently lists 4gb
Specially the moment you open the browser
I’d be curious, did you profile if it’s for all pages or only some? I’d expect e.g. Facebook or Instagram to be more demanding than Lemmy or ProtonMail but to be honest I have no idea.
Prefetching, prediction, media, infinite loading (gradually) or aggressive tracking can increase the usage.
I’ve had a single jira page use 6GB on Firefox.At least with that 6gb you get the nice, streamlined, intuitive and responsive user experience that we all know and love Atlassian for.
My current Android phone has 4GB and it’s really smooth. I’ve got 90 Firefox tabs open and several apps. I’d love to see that level of optimization in a startup, but more RAM will just mask the bad optimization.
As an ex-Andrpid dev, all this optimization is what killed the creativity. Every feature you currently have is hyperoptimized (even with dedicated battery optimizations turned off for the most popular apps), and as a result nothing you can’t easily change is changeable anymore.
Want a widget that self updates every couple minutes by connecting to the internet? Can’t have that, even if the user explicitly accepts it. Want to customize behavior of things in the settings? Nope. Want to hook into the phone memory and do crazy hacks? Not even with root. Want to keep running some checks to determine when to send a notification? Can’t do that either, non-push notifications are all scheduled in advance.
I’ve learned not to get my hopes up with kickstarters but I’ll keep an eye on this one
I’m still too dumb to learn… Ask me about my OKPad! In fact, ask me for my OKPad. Please, take the god awful thing off my hands!
Oh, it’s awful! I mean, I knew it was going to be a bit heavier, with the dual screens, but I figured for media and stuff I could use it like a laptop. What I didn’t know? No keyboard on the e-ink. If you have it in landscape, you have a giant, unusable keyboard on the LCD part. No backlight on the e-ink. No way to move apps from one screen to the other without closing them out completely. But this is the part that really bakes my bacon… No portrait mode on the e-ink side. None. The good eReader review seems to have missed that it’s absolutely, 100%, stuck in landscape! Also, the battery is awful. I listened to a podcast for 10 minutes, display off, and burnt 10% of the battery. I have 10-year-old laptops with better battery life. I asked for a return/refund, but of course, crickets. Their only support is apparently on a Facebook page. I won’t be getting Facebook any time soon, but I am told that they are ignoring support requests anyways.
I’m intrigued. And although I read the article, I’m not entirely sure who or what this is for. It’s cool, but… what?
I feel like this would fit in some unexpected areas of mobile computing. Music, interfacing with other equipment (e.g. industrial computing), or other places where people might normally take a full laptop where that’s kind of overkill.
I’m not really sure, and I kind of wish I had a need for one.
I’ll wait for retail if ever. I learnt my lesson about backing tech based kickstarters.
I’m still waiting on my Soundband headphones.
I enjoyed my Ouya back in the day.
I actually still have mine somewhere. I didn’t use it much, though.
I like the form factor, but seeing the issues with supply on hackberrypi and uconsole, im hoping they dont have the same issue. Lots of people like that form factor (including myself).
I like how Linux has been picking up lately. Finally.
It’s just a matter of time as so many corporate products and services enshittify. That, plus FOSS’ main issue is the average person not having any idea what it is or what it means.
It’s the year of Linux, just as it has been every year for the past thirty years!
