Despite initial interest in the 1990s and early 2000s, palmtop computers never really took off. Realistically most consumers were probably satisfied enough with smartphones as they became more widely available, but those of us who would prefer a real keyboard on our mobile devices are still feeling the pain. Today there are still a few commercial palmtop-like machines out there, but they aren’t exactly mainstream.
Which is why this 3D printed case for the Pixel 6 Pro from [TypingCat] is so interesting. It takes a relatively popular and capable contemporary phone, pairs it with a physical keyboard, and manages to create something that looks quite practical. Thanks to Termux, you can even get a fairly usable Linux environment going on the thing.
There aren’t too many components at play here, but still, we appreciate the fact that [TypingCat] provided links for not only the specific Bluetooth keyboard used, but the fasteners required to hold the three printed parts together. A link is also provided to the Termux-Desktops project, which allows you to get a Linux X11 desktop environment running on Android. It’s not the pocket Linux computer of our dreams, but it’s pretty close.
While the Pixel 6 Pro is a solid enough choice to base this project around, we’re interested in seeing if the community will come up with variants of this case to hold other similarly sized phones. It’s interesting to note that [TypingCat] has decided to use the “No Derivatives” variant of the Creative Commons license for the bottom half of the case. But since the top half is a remix of an existing Pixel 6 Pro case from [JoshCraft3D], it carries a more permissive license and must be distributed separately. Long story short, folks can create and distribute custom versions of the phone-side of this case, but the bottom needs to remain the same.
If you’ve got filament to burn extrude and would rather have a more pure Linux experience, we saw a printable Raspberry Pi Zero palmtop a couple months back that looked quite promising.
That’s funny, I’m actually working on a similar project for a OnePlus 6t (for postmarketOS) but I was going to have it wired so it can be a powerbank and USB hub too.
The keyboard I was going to use is from an HP Jornada, based on a similar phone keyboard case I saw.
it’s always the way, you’re halfway through a project and it pops up on hackaday the day after the components arrive :D
If it was a bad idea, nobody else would be trying it. At least you can enjoy the validation!
Worth adding: I started this project because the Pinephone keyboards are no longer made or sold. I’ve wanted a Linux pocket pda for a long time and I’ve finally run out of options, so I decided I’ll just do it myself.
I have one of the pinephone keyboards and you’re really not missing anything. It’s buggy, you’re limited in which distro’s have the i2c driver in it, the build quality isn’t very good(upper right of entire keyboard intermittently doesn’t work), and the key legends don’t match what extra symbols with no way to remap it.
I have wanted to do the same as you and make my own keyboard running qmk/zmk for awhile.
I plan on open sourcing it eventually (when it’s done and working, so people don’t try to make a possibly broken thing) but it’ll likely be a month or so because I have a bit more work to do before I can order any boards (and then I need to make a case for it, and make the phone holder base so it can be adapted to other phones)
If you have a hackaday.io page for it link it. I’d love to follow/test.
i think this project highlights why phones are good enough for people — a phone plus a bluetooth keyboard gives you this power. there’s such an abundance of bluetooth keyboards, and this 3d printed hinge just slightly adds to that abundance.
personally, i use a full sized “tkl” keyboard that fits in my jacket pocket with my phone sometimes. it’s pretty marginal already getting a phone into my pants pockets these days — doubling its thickness like this hack would rule that right out. but really i hardly use that because my laptop is so inexpensive and durable and long battery that i don’t mind throwing it in a backpack even if that means it might get smooshed by groceries or thrown or moistened so on.
Dang it, my phone is a Pixel 7. I doubt my CAD skills are up to snuff to remix this. Great work, I love it! Highly jealous!
yes, with a smartphone the missing keyboard is the biggest issue in usability. But when you add one, you lose the capability to carry it in your jeans pockets. Current smartphones come with such a big screen that this is barely practical on their own, adding a bit of extra thickness and weight makes it impossible.
So you are already in handbag or small backpack territory.
I tried something like this out in a mockup with a bluetooth keyboard. I quickly came to the conclusion that the limited screen size quickly comes after the keyboard in usability issues.
Since I am already carrying this in a small backpack, I can also take a very small laptop with me that properly solves both issues. I found the Chuwi MiniBook X (10.5 inch) mini-laptop and that now works quite well for me:
https://eu.chuwi.com/products/minibook-x-2024
Everything I’ve owned from Chuwi has died after a couple of years 😐
I had a 7″ Chuwi tablet and one day it did a windows update and bricked itself after rebooting. I opened a support ticket and they denied me, claiming I had somehow reflashed it by doing a windows update. It ended up in the trash.
I’ve had a Chuwi 10″ windows tablet (with removable keyboard), it’s been working great for many years. It started with WIn10, and now it has Win11. It’s my go-to for travel when I’m not planning to do any work, and I just need a computing device that works.
Nobody here mentioned this yet, but Android phones used to come with slide-out keyboards, and before that, Windows phones had keyboards. I still have my old HTC Wizard with a slide-out keyboard, it’s a relic of mobile computing but I did all kinds of stuff with it. It was pretty awesome and physical keyboards are something I really miss about my old mobile phones. Now I have a fold, and its keyboard takes up half the screen. I’d definitely add-on a folding physical keyboard if one existed.
“Never took off” pff they took off massively and started a lot of the infrastructure that made modern cell-phones into a thing. They fell off a cliff due to business dealings. ..now we have a lot of cheap and easy tiny compute on hand we can remake those form factors from back then with more powerful computers.
Didn’t see many on the streets, and the people who did have them had them more as executive toys than for any real purpose.
The major issue was that the software was so primitive and incompatible. Besides games, they were all just awkward email readers and digital notepads/calendars that were difficult to sync with anything else. If you wanted to read a PDF file or a word document on the go, either you had no software to do it, or the device was too feeble to render the document in the first place, and the user interaction was terrible.
Not to mention the screen sizes and resolutions of a potato, so even if you had had the software to render a document, you couldn’t actually see s**t with a 640×200 display in glorious 16 color or monochrome LCD.
And the third point is that these PDA devices were mad expensive for the amount that they could actually do. For example, a HP 620LX Windows CE 2.0 palmtop in 1998 cost the equivalent of $1,720 today accounting for inflation.
It sported a 640×240 screen in 256 colors and Pocket Excel/Word/Explorer and a slot for a modem, which would have cost a ton as well, and you would have needed to find a telephone socket to plug into, and you had no “cloud” services to sync with even if you did, so you had to carry it all the way back home to sync with a cable to your desktop PC to update your calendar.
With the rapid pace of software development at that time, your Pocket Explorer would not have been compatible with many websites, so even if you did get online there’s very little you could do with it. For the techie types, you could do things like telnet into your company server and do some basic maintenance, but for the general public it was a completely useless device.
As for the early to mid 00’s, standard feature phones started getting JAVA apps to access your stock ticker or your weather report. With the inability of PDAs to actually do any sort of productivity tasks, the cellular phones took over the scene instead. Not because the PDAs or palmtops paved the way there, but because the constant wireless connectivity that the PDAs lacked became a thing.
Considering the era the first round of Palmtop concepts are from they are remarkable capable for a truly portable device. Only just getting out of the era when ‘portable’ meant a suitcase sized brick into the laptop type form factors, and the concept of a mobile telephone is actually pocket sized not car mounted…
Those early laptops generally had most of no performance, no battery life, terrible screen resolution (for the screen size), are still pretty darn giant, etc as well – if anything I’d argue they are on the whole less functional in the role of portable devices than the palmtops. As the laptop of the era trend towards being very very far from a desktop in performance/functionality and really not being that portable either…
Also curious what device you ever played with, as that did not look to be the experience on such things at all to me (exposure to the parents and friends parents work devices) – slow enough to be frustrating at times like computers of that era often were anyway, but cranked up a little more for extra frustration sure, and the limited screen size is somewhat limiting, but you are still in the era when 1080P is somewhat rare and most folks still have CRT’s on their desk – low resolution and limited useable screen real estate by today’s standard absolutely but in comparison to the usual desktop display of the time actually kinda impressive. And functionality on the basic office, email and calendar stuff seems to have been there at least on the few devices I got to see and interact with.
Also complaining a high tech device at the more cutting edge is in today’s money approaching $2K really doesn’t sound that bad when you look at the prices for modern smartphones – Anything more than the most basic models from the cheap and dubious quality/support brands isn’t cheap you are looking in the ballpark of half that number for the current base model from a ‘trusted’ brand. Then as soon as you get close to the same sort of level of ambition relative to the technology level of the era, so comparing with the folding larger screen phones for example…
You don’t have to go to China to find good brand phones for $200-500. If you’re paying more, you’ve fallen victim to marketing.
The original iPhone cost over two grand, but that’s exactly a point in case – it was a useless gimmick toy for rich people. Didn’t even have an appstore at launch so it was just a fancy feature phone.
As for laptops vs palmtops – the point still stands: the laptop ran normal pc software while the palmtop was reduced to a fixed set of “pocket” software light enough to run on it, which made them largely useless and incompatible with everything else.
By 1998 you had already laptops with SVGA screens in the same price bracket, and they were no longer “luggables”. Example: IBM Thinkpad 560. It was just under 2 kg and the size of an A4 sheet, so fairly similar to modern laptops or netbooks actually. Came out in 1996.
So you already had laptops that fit in a handbag and ran proper desktop software. Who would want an even smaller version that cost the same but did not have any real software to use?
Dude for a period of time the laptops are pretty terrible, as they are burdened with a universal operating system really intended for the bigger desktop, one that is rapidly growing in functions and already bloating a bit. They are pretending to be portable desktops but still not really convincing (for instance I had a Pentium 4 desktop chip in a laptop as my first personal computer, that thing ruins the battery life, still has less performance than the actually older generation desktop (when I’d be able to use it), weighed a ton as the cooling is both more primitive and aiming at a higher TDP than most modern laptops – it is not all bad, but to get something close to the desktop performance with desktop software the tradeoffs are considerable, and it really isn’t pocketable.
The more device specific essentials on the palm type stuff worked really well, and remarkably snappily while ALSO having battery life (at least by the standards of the day). They are also rather more fishing in the not yet existent POCKET sized smartphone market than in the carry a laptop bag everywhere crowd…
The changes in tech between the late 80’s and 2005 or so are crazy especially in the evolution of portable devices (a cassette player was still a common enough option that hasn’t phased out when the first HDD MP3 players start to exist, and somewhere in the middle there portable CD players happened and the more durable but at the time very very small capacity flash type players as well). For several years in that range the Palmtop type stuff was the only option that really makes sense for easily portable, practical on the go – battery life, good performance at the tasks it does, very portable. Laptops and netbook type concepts and the eventual existence of something closer to a modern smartphone get in the mix eventually, but the Palmtops where the option in that role, which is why lots of business would give them to the right type of employee…
This looks awesome!
I wonder if you could use a magnifying fresnel lens and so the phone screen looks bigger.
For ages I’ve been wanting to do something like this for my iPhone 13 Pro, but using a slider keyboard instead. There’s slider gaming controllers coming to the market, but why not keyboards? I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who wants something like this, in any case.
Is it available commercially??
I too have a few parts on the way … though my hardware skills are pretty limited.
I’ve been a palmtop fan since the psion 3a, but the qwerty slider phones are my favourite form factor. I’ve had them all from the Nokia 9110, through the wince era to the fxtech pro1, but now there’s simply no usable product out there for me to buy.
Big problem here is keyboard cases still leave all the weight on the phone side.
If there are any casemodders out there who could prize open a recent midrange phone, attach the screen to a slider mechanism, and put a minimal card-key style PCB keyboard on top of the battery/processor side, I’d be very interested!
I love my Lenovo Legion Go (despite it being Windoze), and would love a flip-down keyboard like this. I know nothing about 3-D modeling, but am wondering if folks have thoughts on how to commission something like this or any hacks (keyboards with hinged clamps?)
I know most people see this and think it’s the missing link of laptops and PDA’s of yore.
But all I see is the SUV’ification of smartphones where they keep getting bigger and bigger in order to justify the equally escalating pricetags, even though the material cost increase is neglectible.
And also the fact that’s making it nigh impossible to find any reasonably sized ones without a significant catch.
A strange take for an after market part – you don’t turn a hatchback into an SUV bolting on ‘upgrades’, you might get a more useful trackday car, or a more comfortable ride but its not going to turn a midget car into an SUV. And the extra parts don’t change the base cost for folks that don’t want them, as they just don’t buy them.
Phones have been getting bigger and bigger for ages because the manufacturer think that is what we want. There are a few little phones out there, Unihertz for instance make the Jelly phones, so if you really want ‘reasonably sized’ you can find it.
There’s plenty of cars especially in recent times where SUV’s and later crossovers emerged where models ballooned in size.
Often they also got changed to such a degree that they’re reclassified from sedans, stationwagons or hatchbacks into SUV’s and crossovers.
Cue the modern smartphone market being flooded with what’s considered phablets, which’re essentially more small tablets with full cellular functionality than smartphones.
You’re just fixated on the “bolting on” part as deflection of this gross and disappointing trend.
This is an aftermarket option for those that are interested, it doesn’t magically make any future device sold bigger or weirder. The two just have no strong correlation!
A manufacturer might choose to reuse the name of an older model that was a saloon and turn it SUV like, but again that has nothing to do with the folks selling car modification parts, as those parts don’t turn a hatchback into an SUV, or even remotely close to making it bigger – if anything they turn it into a pocket racecar for the roads…
The company building these phones things are making bigger by default because that is what they think will sell, and they must be reasonably correct in that as they keep making money in obscene quantities. But equally clearly not universally loved which is also why companies like Unihertz exist and can survive despite being comparative nobodies, as all their devices are in the ‘anti-Iphone’ design styles – filling the niches that are underserved but Samsung/Apple/Google etc.
Same thing with computers for ages the only company making really small clamshell laptops I know of was GPD, and handheld gaming devices GPD, Ayaneo etc existed before the Steamdeck rather proved the market was valuable and everyone of the big names creates their own version…
I would love one of these for a Pixel 7. One of the reasons I loved the XDA Exec and Surface Duo was the ease of typing.
Shame companies just don’t release add ons like this as I would and likely others be happy to pay for a physical keyboard.