The PDA is dead. Long live the PDA! The quirky little personal digital assistants that were found stuffed in pockets and backpacks throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s met their demise at the hands of the smartphone. It’s no wonder why: a phone can do everything a PDA could and more, only better. However, after two decades of smartphones, people are increasingly seeing them as sources of distraction rather than productivity, weighed down by endless notifications, addictive social media feeds, and a constant demand for attention.
Coding on the device (📷: Ashtf)
This has led to an anachronistic resurgence of interest in PDAs. One in particular that we have been following here at Hackster News is the PocketMage. Brought to life by YouTuber Ashtf, the PocketMage is a modern take on the classic PDA. It comes equipped with an E Ink display and a powerful microcontroller, and it was built specifically for productivity — you won’t find a notification or social media feed anywhere on the device. And now, you can buy your own PocketMage because the long-awaited crowdfunding campaign is finally underway.
Rather than trying to replace your smartphone, PocketMage focuses on doing a handful of things exceptionally well. The device is built around an ESP32-S3 microcontroller with 16 MB of flash and 2 MB of PSRAM, providing enough horsepower for writing, organization, and light development tasks while maintaining excellent battery life. Its most distinctive feature is a dual-display design that pairs a 3.1-inch, 320 × 240 E Ink display with a slim 1.8-inch OLED panel. The E Ink screen is used for reading and writing long-form text, while the OLED handles menus and other fast-changing interface elements that need a better refresh rate.
Once folded, the PDA is easily pocketable (📷: Ashtf)
A full tactile QWERTY keyboard makes note-taking, journaling, and coding feel much more like using a miniature laptop than pecking away on a glass screen. An integrated capacitive touch bar provides intuitive scrolling, while USB-C charging, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a microSD card slot, a real-time clock, and a 1,200 mAh battery round out the feature set. For hardware hackers, an expansion connector exposes GPIO, I2C, SPI, and UART interfaces, making it possible to connect custom peripherals and add-on modules.
PocketMage runs a custom operating system built on FreeRTOS that is entirely open source. Out of the box, it includes productivity-focused applications like a Markdown editor, calendar, journal, dictionary, and terminal, but users are also free to sideload third-party software or contribute their own applications. Both the hardware and software are released under the Apache-2.0 license, encouraging the community to extend the platform in whatever direction they choose.
You can pick up a kit for $185, or if you want to save some time, an assembled PocketMage costs $235. More details are available on Crowd Supply.