Mecha Comet – Open Modular Linux Handheld Computer

Creator here.

I can completely understand the skepticism, any startup today releasing something and promising to support will be taken with a grain of salt. I cannot guarantee that Mecha will not run out of business in 7 years. But at the very least we have the confidence to commit to 7 years of support, if we are able to keep the show going.

Why we are confident of extending this support -

1. The SOC from NXP is widely used in automotives and industries. Their support is listed till 2036, https://www.nxp.com/products/nxp-product-information/nxp-pro... which means their downstream will keep seeing updates. In above comment I mentioned that they follow 6 months+LTS release dates. To give an example, IMX6 that were released in 2011 are still actively supported in 2026. You can even buy SOMs and are still deployed in production.

2. The WiFi chip we are using is NXP IW612, again has longevity till 2038, which means it will still see its driver being updated and maintained.

3. Our audio codec is from Analog (MAX98090) again widely used and in production.

4. Most of our usb and power controllers are from TI, which can be expected to be around in the kernel for a long time.

5. None of the parts we've used are not recommended for new design or obsolete or come from unknown vendors. A lot of care has been taken in choosing the right parts?

From my point of view our work in supporting is to ensure we pull changes, run our test suites, see if everything works and repeat. What am I missing? There are no device drivers built that are exclusive to the Comet at this stage. You can review our device trees on our repos.

Also, we have a longer roadmap ahead of us - selling few thousand units in 5 days is no indicator of how things will be in the future. We are betting on this hardware and more hardware that we release later.

You can sit on the fence and keep expecting us to fail, that is your prerogative. But that doesn't automatically imply that we are ill-prepared.

(edit: formatting)

Creator here,

We haven't because it isn't primarily a phone. But we will eventually. But the folks at PlaMo are testing their dialer app and it works fine.

Buyers beware: 4-core A53 is genuinely unusable (original Pinebook/PinePhone specs), A55 is better but I still wouldn’t recommend buying. You may expect performance similar to 15+ years old desktops.

I'll buy it when I see it working as a phone. Looks like phone support is an option here, but after I bought the pinePhone, I am wary it's not going to work.

Thanks for this. When I first saw this I was expecting to find it was a dead-end Chinese SoM with an ancient kernel - so the fact it's an iMX (which has great support from NXP) is great.

I had a poke around the u-boot and linux repos they share, and it looks like the changes from mainline are pretty minimal - mostly related to device trees and configuration. That's to be expected for any custom board.

Obviously if the company died before this stuff was mainlined, then someone would need to maintain it. But from what I've seen everything you'd need is out there already.