My new alternate-timeline-smartphone toy

I've got a bit of blog catch up to do, but in the spirit of blogging small, I have some quick posts to get out there first.

I got a new toy a few weeks ago. The uConsole is an enclosure/case thing for the Raspberry Pi CM4 with a screen, trackball, and keyboard. It's almost like a smartphone from an alternate world where the iPhone never happened, and I kind of love it.

The device is chunky, heavy, made of metal, and gorgeous:

I first heard about this from this video:

It comes as a kit you assemble, then you flash an SD Card for the Raspberry Pi and you are off to the races. You do also have to source your own 18650 batteries, but that wasn’t too expensive and there is good advice on their forum for tracking down the right type.

Because this has the built in screen, keyboard, trackball, and battery charging hardware, not every OS image that works on a Raspberry Pi will work here without modification. Again I recommend checking out the forum to find the community maintained images. I’m running a Debian based image on mine.

So far I haven't done anything crazy with it, but I have been installing software and using it for light general computer-y tasks, like writing this blog post on this kind of delightful keyboard. I may not type fast on it, but it is fun. I have also been doing a decent amount of basic web browsing on it, Raspberry Pis are surprisingly usable for that nowadays.