They're cute though. If you had one, what would you be doing with it?
As others already put it, the form factor is great for working on public transportation. No need to somehow wriggle out your laptop but simply slide this mini-laptop from your bag and start working.
A small keyboard is something one needs to get accustomed to, but after years now i can sincerely say that i type nearly as fast on the Portfolio as on a regular sized keyboard... and i would assume, that this new computer would have a much better keyboard than the old Portfolio.
Ok, now on the topic "what to do with this device": I mainly use the Portfolio for notes during meetings, hacking together a few figures in the spreadsheet app (something that is just plain uggly on an smartphone) and as a knowledge database for my daily work (e.g. MAC-adresses and so on).
One thing i have not found in any modern computer is the battery-liftime of the Folio: Nearly a month on three AAAs!
My laptop slides just fine out of my bag.
I loaded up an RPi with arch, popped a thumb drive on there and created some startup scripts. Once the RPi booted up it just performed a rolling packet monitor. Once I was alerted about a disruption I went and grabbed the thumb drive. I found a Modbus TCP driver bug.
What’s even better is I ended up ‘packaging’ it in an enclosure and was able to utilize it in a lot of scenarios. I’ve been using it over the past 2 years.
Edit: in the industrial world equipment like this is not in racks/server rooms. They are usually located in panels that have no external networking (security). When I ‘grabbed’ that means traveling to the site and literally taking the drive.
A rack by any other name . . . :-)
TBH I was thinking of not just the trad. IT server room racks but also of cramped radio comms "cupboards" by towers and of production circuit | industrial control access panels / locations in both indoor "warehouse" production and outdoor mineral processing circuits ..
Always handy to have a small known general purpose computer with ports, scripts, utilities, etc when you're tracking down the weird bug of the day.
However, for ultimate utility I think the next iteration of my packet scraper will be a dual NIC’d SBC so I don’t have to worry about hubs or ‘managed’ switches with port mirroring.
my first was the transmeta based sony picturebook. since then i have had various other devices of similar size. the largest was probably the OLPC XO. the small but sturdy form means that they pack easily. i just toss it in the bag, not worrying much. with any larger laptop the problem is either weight, or it's so thin that i fear it could break if i don't protect it from things that might push against it.
the small form factor helps to reduce the amount of time i like to spend in front of it. so i really just use it for things i need to do when not at home or in the office.
the downside is that these devices are actually rather expensive, but for me they were what enabled me to be a digital nomad for a several years.
It's sad that this was the last tablet Sony ever made.
In the end, I found it's slightly too bulky with a 10kg luggage allowance. But if it weren't for that, I think it would be a frequent travel companion for trips abroad.
I don't see a "travel" use case that couldn't be served by a MacBook Air (with the Karabiner utility to fix ITS insufferable lack of a Delete key).
To me this thing is for very limited technical scenarios, for example as a video signal generator or some kind of analysis or testing device to be used in the field. It might be pretty cool for something like that. Or for mobile hacking.
I am a bit surprised to see no Raise/Lower Keys on the render, but maybe it's not the final layout?
[0] - https://openpandora.org/
Now as an adult it just seems silly. of course i never would have expected to be able to do so much with just a phone or tablet
I think it's a cool device, but it's definitely not worth that much.
If they could do it for maybe <300, I think there would certainly be people considering it, but at that price (and of course the fact that it seems to never get finished) I am not sure they can rally a great community again like they could with the original device.
A community wanting such a device would maybe be better of producing a keyboard/gamepad accessory for existing hardware and hacking free software for same. The rockchip based platforms seem like a good target for example.
My imagined use of such a device is something like this.
I board the bus and there's, fortunately, a seat. I sit down, but a full-sized laptop wouldn't fit between my lap and the seat in front of me. I pull out the computer and finish up typing my notes about electrostatically-driven hydrogen–boron fusion, perhaps switching back and forth between Emacs and Jupyter as I do some calculations that go slightly beyond the back of the envelope.
Then I switch to an OpenStreetMap viewer to confirm where to transfer to a different bus (though the Pocket Reform evidently doesn't have built-in GPS, I can read a map), and check my address book to make sure I know the address where I'm going. Because the disk is encrypted with a strong passphrase, I know that my address book won't fall into the wrong hands even if the computer gets stolen, unless the thieves have video of me entering the passphrase.
I'm arriving early, so when I get off the bus at the transfer point, I stop at a café, sit down at a table inside (out of reach of motorcycle thieves), buy a cappuccino, and bang out a couple of pages of a story I've been thinking about. Probably a first draft I'll totally rewrite, but I have to get through the first draft before I can write something worth reading. For background information for the story, I refer to the copy of Wikipedia in the computer's local copy, using Kiwix.
Then a cool idea about cellular automata occurs to me, so I try it out in JS using Emacs and Firefox, then commit it to Git. I can't remember how to draw circles on a <canvas> so I consult a locally stored snapshot of MDN using Zeal. (If that had failed, I'd've used a locally stored snapshot of Stack Overflow using Kiwix.)
I pay for my coffee, stick the computer back in my pocket, and continue on to my landlord's house, where I pay him the rent.
Then I take another bus to the university; on the bus I use the computer to review the textbook chapter the professor will be teaching today. The desks in the classroom are too small for a full-sized laptop, but the computer fits on one of them neatly. I use it to compute eigenvalues for some of the matrices the professor writes on the board in order to test a hunch I have about them.
After class, I'm chatting with another student, and they mention they're interested in learning assembly language. I pull out the computer and open up a web server I wrote in assembly a few years ago; it's small enough that I can scroll through the code in Emacs while holding it in one hand, so we don't need to sit down.
On the bus home I use it as a music player, playing through my headphones.
At home I charge it and connect to the Wi-Fi in my house and do an incremental backup of the machine to my home server, which is a Raspberry Pi Zero with a USB disk plugged into it. That way, if the Pocket Reform does get stolen, I can restore the full system state onto a new one.
The next morning I see that my web server has a problem. I suspect that disabling Markdown on comments will solve the problem, but I want to make sure they don't look too broken before I push the config live. So I test the config change in a "staging server" that's really just a QEMU virtual machine running on the Pocket Reform. It turns out that it doesn't fix the problem. Once I figure out what does, and test it in QEMU, I push the config change live. (I'm testing in QEMU instead of Docker because the server is an amd64 box.)
Now I want to go visit a sort of Fab Lab that a friend of mine is setting up in the suburbs. So I consult the bus routes on the computer, stick it in my pocket, and go outside to wait for the bus. Once I'm on the bus, I open up OpenSCAD to put the finishing touches on a mechanical-computing lookup table design I'll try to 3-D print at my destination. It looks wrong, so I run git diff, which shows me that I have a forgotten uncommitted change from six months ago that is fucking it up. git checkout multlut.scad solves the problem, and by the time I get off the bus I have an STL file on my MicroSD card ready for him to slice.
While I'm there, I show him a Xyce simulation of a power supply circuit I've been working on, and he shows me that my circuit is too sensitive to noise in a way I hadn't thought to simulate.
At night I have a date. We end up talking about oral sex technique, and I mention an instructional video I'd seen that showed me some interesting techniques; later at home I show the relevant part of the video.
Throughout all this I never transmitted an IMEI to a cellphone network, and I only ever transmitted a randomized Wi-Fi MAC address, and that only when I was at home. I never sent my data to a data center in the United States, China, or South Korea. I never had to overcome artificial obstacles to installing my own software — or hardware. I was never at risk of not being able to install OpenSCAD because it had been removed from the app store because it hadn't been updated in three years. I never had to deal with any malware, spyware, adware, or antifeatures. None of my files were ever matched against a secret government blacklist of forbidden files. The page numbers I looked at in my textbook were never transmitted to Seattle. I never had to do a CAPTCHA to keep my computations from being aborted. No advertisements interrupted the oral sex video, and because it is stored locally, there's no risk that it will have been deleted from the server because of a DMCA notification.
Still, I think it would be better with a camera (with an obvious hardware power switch which activates a camera app when it's turned on) and GPS.
I fiddle with about 5+ settings whenever I prepare to leave home, board the bus, or disembark at my destination. That includes toggling WiFi or finding an SSID nearby, toggling mobile data, Bluetooth, battery saver/brightness, DND/ringer, etc.
Why does a general-purpose smartphone force me to manually press all these buttons in a checklist sequence that's easily forgotten? Why can't I just configure one green button that says "Leaving home" and it executes all those settings on my behalf? Another red button that says "Arrive at church" and it goes silent/off-net/DND?
And why, when I turn the phone's power off and back on, it restarts with all the same settings even if I've switched contexts? If I shut down a noisy connected phone, I can't turn it on at church because it'll gratuitously probe the network, use mobile data, chirp with texts and calendar reminders.
So even better than those aforementioned buttons would be geofencing, that allows me to configure where DND/ringer is on, where BT, WiFi and mobile data are allowed, etc.
If a device is going to feature dozens or hundreds of fiddly gadget preferences, please allow users to create "big knobs" or scriptable actions to simplify them!
Geofencing and time-of-day auto-profile-switching have the potential problem that they fight with your manual configuration. You turn on notifications to make sure you don't miss news from the hospital about your wife, and then an hour later the geofence turns them back off. That sort of thing has a kind of irreducible complexity and potential for user error.
This way, I can select a phone with good specs, then install LineAge with Linux terminal, and use the phone as a PC for development, note-taking, texting, etc.