MNT Pocket Reform open for orders | Hacker News Reader

MNT Pocket Reform open for orders

crowdsupply.com

114 pointsyuvadam38 comments

I love the Reform (typing on one now). Over the last couple years it has been remarkably dependable, and I've been able to make a few mods to it- such as changing out the keyboard PCB/switches to choc white.

I really appreciate that the new SOM for the Pocket will be compatible with the Reform. I can't afford a Pocket, but I will be upgrading my Reform.

The thing is... I have a GPD Win Max 2. It's not very repairable. The company is questionable. If it breaks, I might be in trouble.

But I run Arch Linux on it, play AAA games using Steam, Proton and gamescope, and the screen is practically bezel-free. The keyboard is quite decent for the size, and the price is in the range of the Pocket Reform, so it would be hard for me to ever justify a low performance ARM device with an 7" screen that is around the same size and weight. I guess I'm definitely not in the intended audience here.

MNT Pocket Reform: Screen: 7" Size: 20 × 12.6 × 4.5 cm Weight: 1100 g

GPD Win Max 2: Screen: 10.1" Size: 22.7 × 16.0 × 2.3 cm Weight: 1005 g

Now, if they came out with an actual palmtop around the size of the old HP 200LX I would buy it regardless of the specs if it ran Linux and had a good keyboard.

I feel you. High performance (for gaming, x64 emulation, stuff like Blender) is our next big topic. First, we wanted to establish a good foundation.

Edit: clarification of "performance"

I do want to add that I really hope these sell like crazy so you can get enough volume to get some higher performance ARM chips in future models! I _do_ think these are amazing looking little devices and would 100% buy it for light work and play if I didn't have my Max 2.

In fact, I just placed an order for your Supporter Pack to show solidarity. :)

Good luck!

Thank you very much!

There is the Planet Gemini [1]. My understanding is that the company was founded by some ex-Psion folk, and the keyboard on the Gemini is supposed to be pretty close to the one on the Series 5. The Gemini runs both Android and Linux.

Having owned both a 200LX and a Psion Series 5 (and other handhelds), I wish I could justify buying the Gemini. Unfortunately, I already have too many bits of tech I don't use regularly to warrant another to go on the pile.

[1] https://www.www3.planetcom.co.uk/gemini-pda

I've got a Gemini PDA from the original kickstarter. The Android support (last time I checked) was out of date.

The keyboard is good, for the size it is (whole thing is large phone size). I have a Psion 5, and the Gemini keyboard is pretty much an exact copy, but better.

I feel like there's 2 kinds of keyboard modalities - thumbs (loved my Blackberries) and touch-type. The Gemini is just a bit too small for touch typing, and is too large for thumbs. It's still very cool.

I typed a couple of blog posts on it, but wouldn't want to do more than that. Since then it's been gathering dust.

I'm planning to eBay it soon to very-slightly-offset a Pocket Reform. From the pictures believe that the Pocket Reform is just large enough to be a touch-typer.

>backlit screen

Totally different kind of device than the Psion Series.

Draws an order of magnitude more power.

This looks very interesting to me. I'm especially impressed they managed to get a mechanical keyboard into this form factor. The only downside I can see is it seems it has a pretty underpowered CPU and only 8GB of RAM. With a little bit more oomph, I could see this becoming my primary travel device.

Thanks for the feedback! If our campaign succeeds, we'll follow up with next-gen processor modules. After all, CPU/GPU/RAM is on an exchangeable module.

I guess it will be enough to run Neovim/Neomutt and Offpunk in sway ;-)

That's great to hear. My wishlist for this would be 16GB of RAM and a faster CPU, preferably something that is at least 3GHz w/ 4 cores if it's ARM based. I'd be happy to trade off battery life for performance here, because it'd allow me to use this with a lightweight Linux setup to do a majority of my work. The challenge is that I am locked into using web applications that would be non-performant on the current specifications, for example Google Workspaces + Slack + Sharepoint/O365 (yes I use /both/ Google Workspaces and O365), so the underlying hardware resources need to be present to run Firefox w/ these apps open without feeling sluggish.

If I could do that, I could migrate off my Mac and use this as my primary work device while traveling, which would be really nice, since I like the keyboard.

I like the idea of such a computer, but is there a reason why the "full package" costs almost the same price as a M2 MacBook Pro? I may not be the target audience but it feels strange.

Economies of scale. It looks like they are targeting ~150 of them to ship ($135,000/$900 = 135). If I assume their non-recurring engineering costs is %50 of the price, that means the budget for designing/tooling/etc. is $67,500, which is actually much, much lower than I actually expected.

A Macbook on the other hand is targeting millions of devices. If we assume, let's say, a Macbooks budget for the same thing was $500M, selling only 10M puts the individual NRE cost to be $50.

Simple: we are a tiny company and make this in little quantities, end-assembled in Berlin, Germany. The BOM is >$500 and we have to pay platform fees as well.

You may also add that MNT product are built for the long-term. While the nice macbook today will be an old cranky thing in 3 years and a piece of junk in 8.

What are platform fees?

I guess at least mouser/crowdsupply

Probably a combination of A) because they're all hand assembled in Germany by people who are paid a liveable wage

B) because people will pay that for shiny nerd toys

Ordered one and, yes, I’m ready to pay for something which is open, designed for free software and is repairable. Also happy to know that my money support real human which are working on inspiring projects and that I can even follow on Mastodon.

Had to work with macbook for multiple years. Will not buy one even for half the price. Knowing that my money is basically going into billionaires pocket so workers in China are building, in terrible conditions, what is a shiny marketed/hipsterish toy that will end as a polluting piece of junk in a few years is not my philosophical ideal.

Yeah I would really like Pine64 to take a stab at this form factor. I guess the closest is the keyboard for the pinephone but that's a tiny screen.

I'm fairly certain mnt customers have much better experiences interacting with the business than pine64 customers do. mntmn often corresponds with Reform users directly in the irc channel.

This is the better business to support from where I'm sitting.

- disgruntled early pinephone order survivor

Pine64 dumps a lot of responsibility on their user base, but in their defense they do list nearly everything they sell with warnings about how they are for developers willing to put in the extra effort.

Similarly MNT warns people about going with RISC-V options in their products. I really hope MNT can get their risc-v modules bumped up with the new SoC's hitting the marking in the coming year as support is born.

> Pine64 dumps a lot of responsibility on their user base, but in their defense they do list nearly everything they sell with warnings about how they are for developers willing to put in the extra effort.

That's no excuse for problems in order fulfillment, poor communication of delays, and months of silent treatment when cancelling. The whole experience resembled buying from a flaky unresponsive ebay seller.

It's just not operationally well run in my experience, YMMV.

The disclaimer is acceptable for things like dead pixels or poor/unstable driver support... I'm not referring to anything along those lines.

The PinePhone has a 6" screen, the Pocket Reform has a 7" screen. That's enough to make a noticeable difference for sure, but it's not incomparable, especially considering the PPKB goes to the very edge of the device and the Pocket Reform has an obvious bezel.

The PinePhone would have far less usable screen real estate[0]. 6" diagonal with an 18:9 aspect ratio would make landscape use almost a non-starter. The Pocket Reform is 7" diagonal with a laptop-like 16:10 aspect ratio.

[0] http://displaywars.com/7-inch-16x10-vs-6-inch-d%7B18x9%7D

Without a doubt, this is a cute little device that could be useful in many situations. I'll admit, though, that I'm a little disappointed at the choice of 2x USB-C ports instead of including USB-A. USB-A is still so much more commonplace, and avoids the mystery-meat cable problems of C.

Slap one of these on the end of your usb-a cables and you're good to go https://www.amazon.com/Adapter-Benfei-Compatible-MacBook-Sam...

If I have to carry a collection of dongles with me it rather undercuts the portability of a device.

Am I right that it claims a battery life of only 4 hours? Might as well not have a battery at all! I'd take an even less beefy cpu / gpu for a 12 hour battery on a device like this

>NXP i.MX8M Plus

>Cortex-A53

The SoC uses a microarchitecture that implements the legacy proprietary ISA (ARM), yet is much slower than the RISC-V SiFive U74, which is already available in SoCs such as the JH7110 used in VisionFive 2.

Sad choice in 2023. I'll be skipping this otherwise appealing device. Maybe a future cpu module will be based on a SoC based on the open standard ISA.

There are a whole lot of different imx8s some better some worse, FWIW I think they're using this module (4+1 core 1.8GHz):

https://boundarydevices.com/product/nitrogen8m-plus-som/

It's a plug in module plugged into another plug in module, no reason why you couldn't hack up a RISC-V upgrade here

Hopefully we'll get a RISC-V module at some point.

RISC-V got strong enough that I am not looking at ARM options anymore.

From the original Reform product page:

> We selected their "Nitrogen8M SOM" module for Reform because it is the only available module for which you can download the complete schematics and understand what every component does.

There are also a number of community SOM projects for the original which should work with the Pocket, including a raspberry pi CM4, and a Layerscape 1028A

You're comparing a 5W CPU to an entire SoM that only draws 2W. Just making that switch cuts battery life to a little over an hour in this device.

You're also comparing a SiFive product whose documentation is mostly "this document will be updated soon" to a product that comes with complete schematics and all the documentation you could ask for.

I don't think you understand the design considerations at play here.

>You're comparing a 5W CPU to an entire SoM that only draws 2W.

JH7110 is not a CPU, but a fully featured SoC. The power consumption is like:

>In sleep mode, the static power consumption of JH7110 is 120 mW. When working on an SBC, with all the main modules under full load, the dynamic power consumption of JH7110 is 4,100 mW.

Source: https://www.design-reuse.com/news/52544/starfive-risc-v-jh71...

Granted. So power consumption is "only" doubled from the existing product and runtime is "only" cut in half. The benefit is that the project is now harder to execute and the BOM is more expensive, assuming you can get through the lack of documentation.

It's still a bad fit.

We'd need to know what the actual load is with both chips.

That 4.1w figure is a maximum, using all the SoC's modules, at the spec clock.

To put in perspective, the NXP's SoC 2.1w figure is just for the CPU[0].

0. https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/fact-sheet/IMX8MPLUSFS.pdf

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