A couple of weeks ago I received something I’ve been eagerly expecting from a Crowd Supply crowd funding campaign.
MNT have been making devices that aim to be “open source, accessible and modular” for a number of years. I didn’t get their original Reform laptop, but I’ve seen those around at events like FOSDEM and I’ve been following the team’s progress with interest. When the Pocket Reform was announced I was immediately intrigued – a smaller form factor, 7 inch full Linux system with open hardware that is easily portable.
I went for the Hyper edition, which came with a beautiful Piñatex sleeve, SSD, and printed manual. Purple, of course, because I want to be on brand 🤓 and, also because I love it!
I posted a very brief unboxing video. I’ve now had a couple of weeks to occasionally tinker, and I’ve been putting off writing about it all in part because there’s a lot of things to dig into!
One of the things I like, surprisingly, is the chunkiness of the machine. It is really well constructed, solid, and feels great. Fits in a small cross-body bag or satchel. It’s less than half the size of a 14 inch MacBook Pro – you can more than fit two of them side by side on top of the Mac – but it is about 3 times thicker – and that’s OK, because, it is in service of making the innards very accessible and user serviceable. It comes with a complete manual and schematic, which is something I’ve not had in a computer since the 8-bit machines of my youth! The top half contains the mainboard and display (all the ports are in the top half), and the bottom contains the battery cells and mechanical keyboard. The upper panel has a copper layer and acts as a large heatsink for the processor module.
The keyboard is ortholinear, which means it is a direct grid layout rather than offset row-by-row. It’s the first time I’ve used this format, which – along with the smaller keycaps – has made it a little challenging to learn, but I’m doing pretty well now. The trackball is nice and responsive. The backlit keys are easy to adjust.
The screen is excellent – bright, and sharp. Actually I think the screen is probably the aspect that has impressed me most so far.
In terms of ports and connectivity – I’ve yet to hook up to an additional screen via the micro-HDMI connector, but I’ve used the USB-C connections (one of which is used to charge / power the machine), and the micro SD slot. The industrial iX connector for ethernet is likely a good choice for the target niche, and certainly does give more space on the motherboard than an RJ45 socket would… but I’ve yet to put my hands on a passive adapter to enable me to plug in to a wired connection, so it’s currently not as useful to me.
There’s a lot more to talk about, primarily (but not exclusively) on the software side, and also around hardware enablement. Out-of-the-box the Pocket Reform runs Debian unstable from MMC, with some customisations to provide a nice getting started wizard. It is important to point out that this is a machine for hackers and tinkerers – although it works very nicely, it’s not all fully baked in places – for example, the firmware for the system controller (a Raspberry Pi RP2040 chip) is being tweaked and tested, and I’ve already tested one update to that which improved the charging behaviour.
The other day I posted about some issues with an NVMe SSD – that, unfortunately, was on this machine. I actually think there was a physical hardware issue with the drive, as I’ve now replaced it with a higher-performance NVMe SSD and things are moving along nicely (while the problematic SSD continues to report errors when accessed in an adapter over USB). I also managed to temporarily brick the machine by corrupting the uboot in flash, and needed to rig it up with Dupont wires on headers and access the machine from another via USB to get back to where I wanted to be. Very Open Source! 😎 but, I’m comfortable with this, and knew what I was purchasing. The forums and IRC have proven to be useful so far and I’m enjoying learning as well as hopefully (!?) helping the MNT team via my feedback and bug reports. I have a huge amount of respect for what they have built, their ethos, and their commitment to making this as open hardware as they can.
I should be receiving a modem / WWAN card for the second internal expansion slot shortly. I’ve been both learning the Sway desktop environment and also working out how best to organise my setup, so there will be more to cover in future. I particularly want to play more with the onboard I2C, and other hardware opportunities, as well – for example, potentially swapping in a Raspberry Pi CM4 if that becomes a modular option in the future.
(and, hello to readers from Hacker News, thanks for reading to the end!)
Update 26th August 2024: I’ve now posted a “field test” that goes into the experience of using the Pocket while outdoors.