[Realman78]

I’m planning to build something like this over the next few months. Think Nintendo 3DS-sized, but as a tiny laptop. The goal is extreme portability while still being able to program on it reasonably well.

I travel a lot and manage servers, so I’ve been wanting a dedicated “SSH machine” that I can always carry with me. With how good AI tooling has gotten, doing real work on a tiny device is suddenly very viable. The other day I SSH’d into a box from my phone while I was at the gym and just told Claude Code to fix a Kubernetes manifest issue. It was fixed and deployed in under two minutes.

I mentioned this idea at work and a few coworkers immediately said they’d buy one if it existed. Curious what others think.

[IgorPartola]

My first and last Android phone was the Motorola Atrix, which at the time was supposed to be quite good. One of its benefits was the idea that you could pop it into a laptop type dock and have it act as a terminal of sorts.

You can also slap a keyboard onto an existing phone. I have tried vibe coding via ssh from my iPhone and honestly it’s not terrible at all. Instead of doom scrolling I can build things.

[tpah8]

I’ve been looking at some tiny laptops. The GPD Micro PC2 is one of my favorites so you can take inspiration from it.

[Fnoord]

I own a GPD Pocket 2. Terrible support from this company. First of all, my screen had an issue (immediately apparent on first boot) and they refused to solve it. So if you buy such from outside of Europe, buy from Amazon instead of directly, not KS/IGG.

Second, their BIOS is a beta version of a commerciel BIOS, lol. As such, it doesn't have Intel SGX enabled.

That said, it served me as cyberdeck before cyberdecks were all the rage, and before they were easy and cheap to build. It stems from a time when ARM64 wasn't still as powerful as the current (approx) decade. Of course the machine has some downsides for 2026 standards. 2x USB-A, 1x USB-C, for example. I'd rather have 2x USB-C, since you use one for power. I also modded the device for better thermals, and have replaced the battery. The machine sits behind 8 philips screws.

One cool thing the GPD Pocket 3 and GPD Pocket 4 have, is similar to what Framework has: a modular port, where you can keep the form factor but gain KVM, RS232, etc.

The base variant of the Mecha Comet comes with very little storage and RAM:

> This is the base variant with 2GB RAM and 64GB Storage.

And a relatively slow i.MX8. If you want to go with the quicker i.MX95 you're better off with:

> This is the base variant with 4GB RAM and 64GB Storage.

But that one is 50 EUR more, and still comes with only 64 GB storage and 4 GB RAM. My GPD Pocket 2 in 2018 came with 8 GB RAM and 128 GB storage (which isn't much nowadays).

As for the screen in that machine, compare:

> 6th generation Corning Gorilla Glass, AF anti-fingerprint coating, 10-point touch, 500 nits brightness

with

> 3.92" AMOLED Display (550 nits), Capacitive Touch

The screen of this machine, while small (4") seems quite decent.

And if you want to emulate any Android apps which are ARM (which you could with Waydroid, if you have pref. 8 GB RAM on your machine), then you better run ARM. You can emulate x86-64 on ARM with decent performance (tried recently with Qemu on a RPi 4, and my daily driver is a MBP M1 variant) but the other way around is not feasible.

[RALaBarge]

I was doing the same recently and came to the conclusion that i would just get a new small macbook when needed. If I was worried about losing it or damage, I also got a netbook for 20 bucks on eBay the other day and installed Debian on it and as a thin client is more than you need, performance wise.

[Realman78]

Nice throwback. I like the idea of 20 dollar netbooks, ordering one for sure! However, the form factor of the product I'm building is smaller than an iPhone XR (that's the only one I have for measure lol), only thicker because it will open up. The point is that I can fit it in my pocket or in someone's fanny pack. With that for factor, you will have to type with thumbs, but I don't mind that. Also, taking inspiration from the Mecha Comet, I could add in a detachable component (keyboard, joystick, etc.)

[Realman78]

Also, the netbooks are old now. A new chip with an optimized linux distro will be a joy to work with.

[Realman78]

I saw that. Cool, but very expensive. It has a bunch of features that jack up the price but are not worth it for me.

[dpoloncsak]

I've been wanting to build something similar, but can't shake the feeling I'd just stick with the SSH client on my phone.

Any reason really to have a separate device for this?