It’s wild to me that ‘enthusiast’ devices in 2026 use 4gb of ram and 4xA53 or 6xA55 processors. Meanwhile similarly priced phones have 8gb ram, 2xA78+6xA55 processors, high refresh rate displays and all the other things a phone might have that this doesn’t.
I know that most big soc manufacturers don’t have open firmwares, but this isn’t even using a moderately powerful Rockchip soc.
Such a weird thing that Apple keeps putting cutting edge top end processors in their simplest devices used by non-techy people while tech gadgets like this have old af low end processors
Other phone manufacturers get monies from phones other than the selling price (ad revenue, money from eg Facebook for preinstalling their app, revenue from their on-phone un-uninstallable stores, etc). Like printers or gaming consoles, the hardware is subsidised.
(And ofc scale, that’s a huge hurdle on it’s own.)
The price is kinda ok on this one.
It’s not the libre hardware tax that bothers me, there’s no smartphone with specs this low since 2022. What I think about when I hear ‘handheld computer’ isn’t something weaker than a midrange phone from 2016.
With these specs the company needs to explain why they aren’t offering more powerful options imo.
I don’t think it’s strange. In no field the experts want bleeding edge machines. They do it with the most efficient
This looks really neat, and it’s awesome to see more open hardware! And the price seems pretty reasonable too for what you’re getting, especially given this is a smaller company. The modular plates are also open, meaning you can design your own ones! It looks like it starts at 2GB / 64GB eMMC, and goes up to 8GB / 128GB. It has display out support too, and the super long software support (7 years) is very nice. The device is apparently repairable too, with spare parts to be easily available too! It’s definitely a computer first, phone second, since LTE support is an optional upgrade, and there is no earpiece speaker (so calls will be very bothersome to others). It also supports M.2 SSDs, but it’s in the more esoteric 3042 B-Key form factor (and an adapter for more standard 2230 SSDs will be another separate upgrade). If the Comet actually comes out and orders are fulfilled, I think this could be an awesome device!
Hm. Looks cool! But… what’s your usecase for it? Tiny Linux computer sounds cool, but I’m not totally sure what I would do with it. Maybe a music player?
Might be nice to read ebooks on.
I’m not going to preorder it anytime soon, I would rather see (independent) reviews of a finished product first. ON their website, they note that it could be good for retro gaming (though that price for the chipset isn’t great compared to the competition, but you get open hardware + modularity!), as a music player (audio jack!), and sysadmin / networking diagnostic stuff (where Linux is preferred over Android or iOS), but obviously there are better devices for each of those use cases. Few devices can do it all though, and you would be supporting open hardware and all that jazz. They also say that it could be useful for testing Linux mobile apps and that sort of stuff (since it’s an ARM chip w/ optional LTE support), but won’t be too good as a daily driver phone (no earpiece speaker, LTE being an optional upgrade).
I probably won’t get this, as I already have a computer (which does run Linux!) and smartphone and don’t need/want another fun Linux device (my OnePlus 6 running postmarketOS fulfills that role already).
Honestly would buy it just for mobile KVM with physical keyboard
This looks really neat actually, and affordable.
wow, if a later version of it can indeed do LoRa/Meshcore, it will be even more interesting to me.
I wonder if it can run a Gnome desktop or phosh with all the stuff still possible available with the default installation.
There would be a module compatible with exactly this one
Waiting for the LTE to be available
This looks like what the Motorola Z series could have been. Even the connector looks similar.
Looks cool, but 500 nits is going to make the display hard to read in daylight.
