71–80 of 103 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or Project Ara Or Moto Z https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moto_Z https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Ara
Or Pockit https://pockit.ai/
I’m planning to build something like this over the next few months. Think Nintendo 3DS-sized, but as a tiny laptop. The goal is extreme portability while still being able to program on it reasonably well. I travel a lot and manage servers, so I’ve been wanting a dedicated “SSH machine” that I can always carry with me. With how good AI tooling has gotten, doing real work on a tiny device is suddenly very viable. The o…
You can also slap a keyboard onto an existing phone. I have tried vibe coding via ssh from my iPhone and honestly it’s not terrible at all. Instead of doom scrolling I can build things.
I’m planning to build something like this over the next few months. Think Nintendo 3DS-sized, but as a tiny laptop. The goal is extreme portability while still being able to program on it reasonably well. I travel a lot and manage servers, so I’ve been wanting a dedicated “SSH machine” that I can always carry with me. With how good AI tooling has gotten, doing real work on a tiny device is suddenly very viable. The o…
I’ve been looking at some tiny laptops. The GPD Micro PC2 is one of my favorites so you can take inspiration from it.
A phone where I can install applications without asking Google for permission.
I’m planning to build something like this over the next few months. Think Nintendo 3DS-sized, but as a tiny laptop. The goal is extreme portability while still being able to program on it reasonably well. I travel a lot and manage servers, so I’ve been wanting a dedicated “SSH machine” that I can always carry with me. With how good AI tooling has gotten, doing real work on a tiny device is suddenly very viable. The o…
I’ve been looking at some tiny laptops. The GPD Micro PC2 is one of my favorites so you can take inspiration from it.
Second, their BIOS is a beta version of a commerciel BIOS, lol. As such, it doesn't have Intel SGX enabled.
That said, it served me as cyberdeck before cyberdecks were all the rage, and before they were easy and cheap to build. It stems from a time when ARM64 wasn't still as powerful as the current (approx) decade. Of course the machine has some downsides for 2026 standards. 2x USB-A, 1x USB-C, for example. I'd rather have 2x USB-C, since you use one for power. I also modded the device for better thermals, and have replaced the battery. The machine sits behind 8 philips screws.
One cool thing the GPD Pocket 3 and GPD Pocket 4 have, is similar to what Framework has: a modular port, where you can keep the form factor but gain KVM, RS232, etc.
The base variant of the Mecha Comet comes with very little storage and RAM:
> This is the base variant with 2GB RAM and 64GB Storage.
And a relatively slow i.MX8. If you want to go with the quicker i.MX95 you're better off with:
> This is the base variant with 4GB RAM and 64GB Storage.
But that one is 50 EUR more, and still comes with only 64 GB storage and 4 GB RAM. My GPD Pocket 2 in 2018 came with 8 GB RAM and 128 GB storage (which isn't much nowadays).
As for the screen in that machine, compare:
> 6th generation Corning Gorilla Glass, AF anti-fingerprint coating, 10-point touch, 500 nits brightness
with
> 3.92" AMOLED Display (550 nits), Capacitive Touch
The screen of this machine, while small (4") seems quite decent.
And if you want to emulate any Android apps which are ARM (which you could with Waydroid, if you have pref. 8 GB RAM on your machine), then you better run ARM. You can emulate x86-64 on ARM with decent performance (tried recently with Qemu on a RPi 4, and my daily driver is a MBP M1 variant) but the other way around is not feasible.
If this thing had a 5G modem it would be the perfect device . A phone where I can install applications without asking Google for permission.
> DIY Phone
> Use the Comet and the Linux stack for calling*, messaging and mobile data as an alternate to your walled and closed smartphone. Contribute to the Linux ecosystem for mobiles.
So I guess this means it can, but it's not supported and you need to contribute the software. So perhaps it has the hardware, and perhaps it might work.
Website's a bit weird. The app icons highlight when you hover over them, but don't seem to do anything. They've got a grab-bag of unrelated Linux etc. org icons - Nix, Debian, postmarketOS, Node, Kubernetes… You could argue that someone _could_ run Nix or Node on it, but Debian is just nerdbait. It's not relevant to the product they're selling, unless you're gonna wipe the disk and support it yourself.
Ah, sorry, that's on me; some of the links are still not active. (It's been a mad week!) Could you tell me which section it was? I'll fix it
Any screenshots or videos of it running? All I'm seeing are renders. As someone who has been burned by crowdfunded "engineering" (where something seems good on paper, and then there's a year or two of posts about all the challenges that were "unforeseen" before a heartfelt postmortem) I feel like that's a requirement.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I made a really cool cyberdeck. It sits on my desk.
Lol, Cyberdeck aka high effort paper weight. There are so many cool vaguely scifi tech projects one could build these days but almost none of them have actual utility. : (
If you perform pentests or red teaming, a mobile device with CLI access is very useful (whether a smartphone is suffice I leave up to the reader). If you are using the device non-mobile, you could attach an external screen and keyboard to it (and perhaps pointer device, I like the Apple Magic Trackpad, even on Linux it works well these days). That way, you could for example write your pentest report on the machine while not fscking up your eyes. Also remember: if you got WLAN or 5G you can get access to more horsepower. It is not as if you were going to run hashcat on these devices locally. You can also run SSHd (and even remote desktop, I guess) on the machine and admin it like that from a fully blown computer. You could also use it with SDR, or for example for reverse engineering (which you could do in a VM as well, if you prefer).
Personally, I think this device would be pretty cool for a kid to learn Linux on (better than the Hackberry Pi CM5 which I got). The UI is neat, there's a CLI, and they can game on as well as explore on it. Pretty good deal a ~250 EUR machine to learn Linux on, as well as game. Remember: if it is ARM, it can run all the Android apps via Waydroid. No emulation or x86-64 Android versions necessary. I see it as a successor to Clockwork Pi GameShell [1] in that regard, as even the 2 GB RAM version is more powerful. That device had only 1 GB RAM, and:
> Introducing new Clockwork OS, based on Debian 9 ARMhf and Linux mainline Kernel 4.1x. You can run PICO 8, LOVE2D, PyGame, Phaser.io, Libretro, and many other game engines smoothly.
There's the Clockwork uConsole [2] as well, and you can put a RPi CM 3 or 4 in it. The A-04 variant specifically seems akin to the Mecha Comet i.MX 8 variant.
> A-04 ARM64-bit Quad-core Cortex-A53 1.8GHZ 4 Mali-T720 2GB DDR3
The RISC-V variant only has 1 GB RAM, the other variants got 4 GB DDR4.
Both the uConsole and the Mecha Comet are candybar format. Compared to Clockwork Pi's Devterm and GPD Pocket series which are clamshell. The Mecha Comet however allows you to easily swap the keyboard with a gamepad. The Clockwork devices don't allow this; they're tailored for either keyboard candybar, keyboard clamshell, or gamepad (candybar).