// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
This E-Paper PDA Wants You to Ditch Your Smartphone for a Keyboard and Two Tiny Screens
Every few months (or years, depending upon how old you are), there is a new "anti-smartphone" device that comes with a physical keyboard and a tiny screen and focuses on doing one thing well.
Freewrite did it for writers. PicoCalc did it for tinkerers. Now Talisman Design, an independent hardware studio out of Phoenix, Arizona, wants a shot at it with PocketMage, a pocketable personal digital assistant that just launched on Crowd Supply.
I find the dual-display setup interesting in this tiny device. There is the main 3.1-inch e-paper panel display and then there is a secondary, 1.8-inch OLED strip for menus and anything that needs a fast refresh. Somewhat like those touchbars in MacBooks except that it's display only.
That's deliberate because although e-paper is sunlight-readable and power-friendly, it's too slow for scrolling menus and hence the secondary OLED display.
Underneath all that is an ESP32-S3, which may feel like an unusual choice for something marketed as a PDA. It's a microcontroller, not the kind of chip you'd find running a full desktop OS, but that's sort of the point.
ESP32 boards have gained a massive hobbyist ecosystem of late, which means PocketMage keeps the whole thing low-power enough to hit that 7-day battery estimate.
A DIY kind of gadget should allow tinkerers some tinkering room. PocketMage doesn't disappoint. It has an FPC expansion port with I2C, SPI, UART, and GPIO for anyone who wants to bolt on their own hardware and thus showing off your engineering skills more than your writing skills.
PocketMage doesn't run Linux. It runs PocketMageOS, a custom, "wizard-inspired" operating system built on FreeRTOS, with a built-in suite that includes a Markdown text editor, a dictionary, a journaling app, and a terminal.
Third-party apps get distributed through something called the Bazaar, essentially an app store for sideloaded software. I can already see a calculator, a text-based web browser, an e-book reader, a Pomodor timer and, a bit oddly, a Tarot card reader among the available apps.
PocketMage is live on Crowd Supply now, and at the time of writing this article has raised $66,538 of its $100,000 goal from 204 backers, with 58 days left to go.