Will MNT eat Pine64's lunch?

I've owned a Pine64 PinePhone for about six months now.

PinePhone

I was originally interested to see what the capabilities of this device were, especially as a target for postmarketOS, which I found particularly compelling from a technical standpoint. Since that time, my PinePhone has come to serve a unique role in my computing life; the battery is far too limited to allow the device to be a useful daily-driver cell phone, but having a very small linux system with the full capabilities of graphical Emacs, desktop Firefox, and a physical keyboard with support for commonly used meta keys has proven invaluable in a number of situations.

PinePhone Keyboard

I once spent the majority of a 10-hour drive (in the passenger seat, that is) developing software in Emacs on my PinePhone. This is not something I would be comfortable doing with my 15.6" 6-pound 175 W laptop. It wouldn't be possible using my iPhone. On the PinePhone, it was downright comfy.

If you're specifically in the market for a mainline GNU+X11 or Wayland+Linux system you can literally fit in your pocket and bring around with you, the PinePhone + PPKB exists as practically the entire market. For $200 to $250 brand new, the barrier to entry is fairly low too. That isn't a crazy amount of money to pay for a device that you don't necessarily need to take over your entire life.

After I spend a few hours interacting with the device at a time, though, it starts to become apparant that it's a bit of a square-peg-round-hole situation. The original "pitch" of the PinePhone was essentially that if you take a cheap Arm64 single-board computer and make it shaped like a cell phone, maybe you can actually get away with it being a "real" smartphone by attaching a modem to it. I don't use it like that; my use case is derivative of the fact that it's basically a single-board computer with built in peripherals + screen, and the added convenience of 4G connectivity. As a 6.1" laptop, the PinePhone + PPKB isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination; it's just easily the best you can get for $250. The battery life is atrocious, you have no access to external peripherals or displays without removing the keyboard, the weight balance is all wrong due to the bulk of the device living behind the screen, and overheats like crazy.

For months I've been thinking that a custom-designed 6.5" linux laptop with 4G connectivity, possibly sacrificing some ergonomics and ability to make actual phone calls in order to get better battery life, could easily become my primary computer in terms of screen-hours-per-day. The PinePhone isn't quite good enough to keep me from reaching for my bulky ThinkPad rather often.

Those of you who read the title know exactly where I'm going.

MNT Pocket Reform

The soon to be available MNT Pocket Reform is exactly the device I describe. It was built to be closer to a shrunk laptop than an expandable phone; it has a higher-resolution (and slightly larger, physically) screen, mouse buttons and a trackball instead of relying solely on keyboard input or touch for cursor use. The CPU is swappable which means it is somewhat future-proof, which the PinePhone isn't, and genuine SoC choice plus lower ambitions means that we can expect the userland issues the PinePhone Pro has to not be nearly as much of an issue. The Pocket Reform does not support making phone calls or sending text messages, but it does have a microSIM card for 4G and 5G support for remote internet connectivity.

In other words, the Pocket Reform is clearly what I had in my dreams the last 4 months of putting down my PinePhone every time I need to use a particularly JS-heavy website or my battery runs out its 40 minute lifetime.

The main problem, obviously, is price. The Pocket Reform is launching very soon, and while official numbers are still elusive, rumor has it that the base price will be $900. You could buy 3 full sets of a PinePhone + keyboard and still have $100 left over for bubble gum at that price! I believe that the price difference alone may dissuade many from directly comparing the two, especially when the PinePhone does have the killer-app of being able to replace your Android or iOS smartphone if you so desired. The Pocket Reform can't do that, and it's 3.6x the price, so why should anyone bother?

The reason I think there's actually more potential for the MNT here is exactly because of what I said earlier about the PinePhone's price point. The PP is just cheap enough that lots of people don't mind dropping that amount on a device they aren't sure will take over their life. Well, for people like me who have been waiting for something like this, there's a decent chance a Pocket Reform will actually take over our life! In that sense, the Pocket Reform probably competes more with my iPhone than Pine64 ever will, because it might actually make a play for screen-hours-per-day closer to my ThinkPad or Apple smartphone, which the PinePhone just can't.

I'm really excited to see what genuine competition in the mobile GNU/Linux space looks like; I don't think we've ever seen that before. I doubt the Pocket Reform will ever come close to the PinePhone's sales numbers mainly due to price alone, of course, but it's certainly won my mindshare already.