People stopped making personal digital assistants (PDAs) as soon as smartphones showed up. It made sense. PDAs got popular on the back of productivity tools, all of which are now available on the same smartphone you can use for calling and texting. So why would anyone want to bring the PDA back? We’re not entirely sure, but that’s exactly what they’re doing with the PocketMage.
A clamshell PDA with a physical keyboard, the device seems to be marketed as a distraction-free alternative to the smartphone. No, it won’t do anywhere near the amount of things a smartphone can do. Heck, it won’t even do all the things your Palm Pilot did back in the day. However, if you could use a pocket-sized tool for writing, coding, or managing your tasks on the go without having to take out your smartphone, this just might do the trick.
The PocketMage is a clamshell device that’s compact enough to slip in most pockets when closed up, making it easy to bring along as part of your everyday carry. It has a dual screen design: a 3.1-inch E-Ink panel with a 320 x 240 resolution as the main screen and a 1.8-inch OLED panel with a 256 x 32 resolution as the secondary display. The smaller display is located just above the physical QWERTY keyboard, allowing you to enjoy real tactile feedback while typing. There’s no touch controls on either screen, but it does have a capacitive scroll bar to the right of the main E-Ink panel, allowing you to quickly scroll through long documents, code, and whatever else you decide to edit on there.
What does the second screen do? Since the main display is E-Ink, they added the small OLED panel for displaying any items that might require a higher refresh rate, such as menus or alerts. That way, you can bring up menus and similar items quickly without the delay you will usually get with e-paper panels.
The PocketMage is powered by an ESP32-S3 microcontroller, along with 2MB of RAM and 16MB of storage. There’s also a microSD card slot, in case you need a bit more storage capacity than the paltry 16MB it provides (and yes, you will probably need it). While all those sound like 90s-era computing specs, it does have modern niceties, include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a USB-C slot that allows it to take modern peripherals, so you can plug in a full-size ergonomic keyboard. There’s no speaker for playing music, but it does have a piezo speaker for letting out beeps and similar alert sounds. They also threw in an expansion port (with power, I2C, SPI, UART, and GPIO), so you can customize it with additional hardware if you want, as well as a 1200mAh battery that should last a few days between charges, given that the main screen is an E-Ink panel.
The whole thing runs a custom version of FreeRTOS, with a suite of built-in apps for productivity, writing, and programming, as well as a couple of games. Users can also side-load their own third-party applications, although that will likely be a hit-or-miss, since this is a custom platform.
The PocketMage is currently crowdfunding on CrowdSupply. Price is $235, although you can also get a kit version that you’ll have to assemble for $185.
