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It sounds like it would be an awesome portable terminal emulator. Are there any good terminal emulator applications for DOS? How is the Minix 2.0 experience if you go that route?
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I’ve never dumped a phone over its software. Ware, damage, swapping networks, meaningfully better hardware, or just losing the things explain basically all the replacements me or my friends / family have done. Sure, eventually people stop updating software to work on old devices but that’s because the overwhelming majority of people have already stoped using that hardware for other reasons.
Just last month I finally moved on from my iPhone 6, which had been working great for 10 years, because some critical apps stopped working unless I upgraded, but couldn’t upgrade because apple no longer released iOS updates. It needed a new battery, but held a charge on low power mode for 8 hours, and otherwise was perfectly fine.
I think there is a class of device here that is missing. Low power but forever devices that have some basic functionality. Over time I could see this taking over laptops and the like as ultra-low-power became more and more capable.
On that note, whatever happened to netbooks? As someone who writes a lot and need a mobile device to do it on, they used to be perfect. Can't seem to find the form factor anymore. Even the smallest Chromebook seems only slightly smaller than a laptop.
The idea of a laptop with an e-ink display running Linux and having days of battery life is really interesting. To save others doing what I did there is an Android tablet like this called 'Daylight' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43098318
Oh, the Clockwork Pi is also interesting. https://www.clockworkpi.com/
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Most people sell or give away fully functional, very powerful mobile phones, because of the end of the software support. Hardware is more than capable for a long time, and is often very durable. But it takes a special kind of audience to put up with decade-old unsupported software, let alone with IBM XT-level software (which I remember using). Security is not a consideration for such devices, because of their very li…
That's the wrong form factor for me, though. A TRS-80 Model 100 with modern guts would be my ideal, but something like this but with a faster screen would be nearly a tie.
The focus on the bundled firmware is word processing, but it's open-source and built around the popular ESP32 microcontroller family.
Can you make one that emulates a PowerBook 100?
Came here to say something similar. A laptop with a high quality transflective screen (e-ink is a touch too slow) that can run classic Mac OS with absurdly long battery life would be a nice little device.
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Just last month I finally moved on from my iPhone 6, which had been working great for 10 years, because some critical apps stopped working unless I upgraded, but couldn’t upgrade because apple no longer released iOS updates. It needed a new battery, but held a charge on low power mode for 8 hours, and otherwise was perfectly fine.
Same with my wife's original iPhone SE. The hardware is doing fine but she's being forced to "upgrade" because of software. It's galling.
I think you’re cool!
Man, I want this, but IBM AT level, 32-bits with at least a 386 and 8MB of RAM.
The IBM AT used an Intel 80286
Take my money. No, really, this is precisely the sort of thing I've wanted for ages, and I don't have the time or resources to build it myself.
I don't know if you've seen the videos, but the latency from input to result on the screen is, very, very bad. I don't think this is actually what you want. We all want low-power retro computing but expect reasonable latency in usage. We also want WIFI working in every room and e-ink that doesn't suck and doesn't cost half a car... And the ability to browse the web (HTTPS). It's just not there yet. When someone will…
Mostly just curious about minimizing energy usage due to wifi.