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Comment by tonyarkles | Hacker News Reader

I had similar feelings but the comments below about adding an SDR to it with an M.2 slot got me looking a little closer. This has an 8-core Rockchip A72/A53 processor and 8GB of RAM. This is not an incremental improvement over the Flipper Zero, this is something else entirely. Hmmmmm...

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It's more like a portable Raspberry Pi with better efficiency and more IO. And hopefully even better mainline Linux support out of the gate.

The key question will be how much it costs. Beyond $250-300, it's a lot more of a niche product. Below $250 would be very interesting. I don't think it will be below $300. With current memory and storage pricing, probably $350-400 is more realistic :(

Its got 8gb of ddr5 in it. That's already a huge chunk of $300 - I'm not even sure they will get the BOM down to $300.

I'm guessing it'll be $1000 or so. (Which is good for me. Well above my impulse buy threshold. I don't regret buying my Flipper Zero, because it was within my impulse buy and not regret it threshold.)

I forgot it has a battery as well, so add on the extra power and charging circuitry. Yeah, probably north of $500, but I can't imagine it being closer to $1000 :/

That extra circuitry is like a dollar retail. That should not be a significant impact on the price. For the battery itself, three 18650s would add $5 to the BOM so I'm not expecting a huge difference from that either.

At the scale they have, prices probably not quite so low, but the power stuff would be more if they use higher quality parts and factor in the integration / firmware bits.

Does it need to be so cheap? With these specs it would make a decent replacement for a low end general purpose computer. The older NUC I use for a lot of stuff has similar-to-worse specs than this thing does.

If it’s not cheap, then what differentiates it from a $150 Linux laptop and $30 dongle

That's exactly my point! It's a low to midrange computer with extremely high portability including a grayscale display. Where else are you going to get that functionality combined as a single unit?

A steam deck maybe?

See the Mecha Comet

I have a $140 Lenovo education market laptop I got from their site, new. It doesn’t have a built in Ethernet port but I taped an L shaped usb dongle to the back.

I use it as a terminal mostly.

So I feel like if this costs more than $400, it’s DOA

Considering this is 6.1 inches wide and 1.6 inches thick, I think I'd be happier with a GPD that's 6.8 inches wide and 1.0 inches thick. And I can put the screen into grayscale mode if I want?

When you say "GPD", are you speaking about these?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPD_Win

Moreso the entire company and its variety of models, but yes. Especially when running Ubuntu. I think they have two models of the size I mentioned right now, one around $600 and one more expensive.

I've been eyeing the MNT Pocket Reform for a while:

https://shop.mntre.com/products/mnt-pocket-reform

A mobile phone?

There are not so many running mainline Linux with all free drivers.

Chip intended for this thing is also heavily blobbed. Even the creator lists "Push vendors to open up their existing closed-source code and ditch binary blobs entirely." as one of the goals as if small niche gadget had any chance of erven nudging the needle.

We are talking Rockchip, company mired in numerous GPL violations with latest nuking their github repository early this year.

And yet a smartphone running an FSF-endorsed distro does exist, so it's possible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5. Not free of firmware blobs though.

Smartphone

This is not a general purpose computer though. There is no keyboard and you would need to start adding stuff. The volumne then would be bulky as hell. Any small form factor laptop would be cheaper and easier and also has better specs.

A cheap laptop with display and keyboard, which would be capable of all that stuff the flipper can do, starts at 200 Euros.

>better mainline Linux support

haha

for reference

https://www.tomshardware.com/software/chinese-semiconductor-...

https://securityonline.info/open-source-standoff-github-free...

https://hackaday.com/2026/01/05/github-disables-rockchips-li...

https://legal.gpl-violations.narkive.com/gAoCqXFb/rockchip-r...

https://mastodon.social/@geerlingguy/113698847221483936 "I was told Rockchip no longer considers RK3588 to be an “open source” chip"

Oh what is it? A powerbank? No a Router! No its Batman

sry had to do this...

I'd love to have a "shit hit the fan" style computer (like a cyberdeck), but also be able to do radio communications stuff as a hobby. But there's no ready-made cyberdeck as far as I know; I feel like Flipper has enough mindshare to be able to lead a project like this.

(Clockwork comes close: https://www.clockworkpi.com/, as do these tiny handheld laptops with network and serial ports like GPD's Micro PC)

As someone else mentioned in another thread, this could be what you’re looking for. Unfortunately it’s above my impulse budget https://shop.mntre.com/products/mnt-pocket-reform

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