A Handheld Computer Free of Walled Gardens

Handheld computing is no longer a novelty with the meteoric rise in adoption of smartphone technologies in the past fifteen years. But while most of us now carry powerful computers with us everywhere we go, they are not really very good at being general-purpose machines. For starters, we can only install certain apps on them that a small number of gatekeepers allow in their app stores, which is quite limiting. Furthermore, there are precious few ways to interface with a phone. Take your pick — USB, wireless, or nothing.

For those that want to do their portable computing on their own terms, alternative devices must be explored. Since these serve a smaller niche, the options tend to be less polished than a commercial smartphone. But there is a new option that will soon be available, called the Mecha Comet, that is geared toward hobbyists that want to do some hacking on the go. And the Mecha Comet looks like plenty of work went into finishing touches for those that want a device that looks as nice as any phone.

The form factor of the Mecha Comet closely matches that of a phone, but with a smaller, 3.4-inch IPS LED display. The remainder of the front of the device is reserved for extensibility. A set of 40 GPIO pogo pins are available for rapid attachment of all manner of peripherals, from gamepads and keyboards to GPS receivers and other sensors. A pair of USB 2.0 ports, and a gigabit Ethernet port, round out the interface options on the outside of the case.

As far as computing horsepower is concerned, the Mecha Comet is roughly on par with something like a Raspberry Pi, with a 1.8 GHz quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor and 4 GB of RAM. It also comes standard with 32 GB of flash memory for storage and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth transceivers for wireless communication.

There are no walled gardens with this little computer. It runs a Debian-based Linux operating system called Mechanix OS, so you can do as you please with it. Exactly what you do is between you and your imagination, but Mecha suggests building an AI assistant, a drone remote control, a robot, or a vehicle debugger for starters.

The Mecha Comet was built to be repairable, so if one component fails you do not have to throw the whole computer in the trash. Everything from the display to the battery and the camera can be easily unplugged and replaced as needed. Try that with an iPhone!

This device looks like it would be a lot of fun to play with, but the pogo pin GPIO interface could be a bit of a pain to deal with. To be sure, it would make swapping components in and out very fast after (and if) a community of developers builds up a library of parts for it. But for one-offs, making the attachment is going to be more challenging than a more traditional post.

If you would like to be one of the first to get a Mecha Comet in your hands, be sure to sign up for notifications on the upcoming Kickstarter campaign. Super early-bird rewards will start at $159.