MNT's Pocket Reform, a Fully-Open Netbook Throwback, Opens the Order Book on March 14th

UPDAYE (3/14/2023): The crowdfunding campaign for the MNT Pocket Reform is now live, with the entry-level Pocket Reform in a black finish and with the NXP i.MX8M Plus-based quad-core module and 8GB of DDR4 RAM priced at $899. A purple-hued variant with the same specifications is also available at $969.

As with the larger Reform, there are also two premium tiers. The Pocket Reform Hyper adds a 1TB NVMe SSD, custom-made sleeve, printed and signed user guide, and a double-sided poster with illustrations and schematics for $1,299; the same bundle is available with the purple finish at $1,369.

All hardware is expected to ship in mid-October this year, MNT Research has confirmed, with orders open now on Crowd Supply.

Original article continues below.

MNT Research's Lukas F. Hartmann is preparing to bring back the netbook with a bang, launching a crowdfunding campaign for the aggressively open MNT Pocket Reform ultra-portable — complete with mechanical keyboard and trackball.

"With Pocket Reform, we’re building a small, portable computer that is transparent about what it’s running and that gives control back to the user, control over operating systems, updates, and software," says Hartmann, who's positioning the Pocket Reform as a throwback alternative to using a smartphone for the majority of your computing. "By adding an ortholinear mechanical keyboard—one with keys that are arranged in a regular grid—and a trackball, we provide a haptic element that has been lost over the years as we've shifted to touchscreens."

Hartmann unveiled the first Pocket Reform concept back in June 2021, as a smaller follow-up to the MNT Reform. Like its bigger sibling, the Pocket Reform is designed to be open — everything from the circuit board designs to the case and the software that runs upon it is as open as possible, licensed in such a way as to allow the community to create spin-off designs and upgrades.

The Pocket Reform shares something else with the full-size Reform, too: the system-on-module. While the machine itself might be smaller, it accepts the same SOM as the Reform — and that includes upcoming upgrade SOMs which offer higher performance, more memory, or alternative architectures like RISC-V. Those upgrades might be necessary for some use-cases, too: in our testing of the MNT Reform we found performance lacklustre in comparison to devices like the Raspberry Pi 4.

The finalised Pocket Reform design includes a 60-key ortholinear keyboard with an RGB LED backlight, beneath which is a 10mm four-button trackball — with no option for a touchpad, unlike the full-size Reform. There's a 7" 1920×1080 (Full HD) display plus a micro-HDMI output for external displays, a mono speaker and physically-switched microphone, and two USB Type-C ports plus an Industrial Ethernet port — which requires an external dongle to accept RJ45 cables.

Precise specifications depend on the model purchased. As standard, they match the full-size Reform: an NXP i.MX8M Plus system-on-module with four Arm Cortex-A54 cores running at up to 1.8GHz, 4GB or 8GB DDR4 memory, a Vivante GC7000UL, and a neural networking coprocessor. There's support for up to 128GB of eMMC storage, with microSD and NVMe expansion. On the software front, the stock operating system is a tweaked version of Debian Linux with support for Arch, Ubuntu, and Void Linuxes plus the 9front port of Plan 9.

The crowdfunding campaign is due to go live on March 14th on Crowd Supply, Hartmann has confirmed, with prices starting around the $900 mark.