These kinds of products are drop dead gorgeous to me. Any time I see a device that has an Amiga 500 form factor or similar, I feel a compulsive urge to click buy. But after many, many of such purchases, I've learned my lesson.

I buy it, I play with it a little bit, but the reality is my phone, iPad, or my laptop can do every single thing better.

Maybe not with the same swagger. But ultimately, as I get older I realize I'm trying to produce with the least friction possible, and usually these devices have either highly constrained touch interfaces, shrunken keyboards, or both.

I've always said that if somebody would create a new HP 200LX device with the same chicklet keyboard that I'd buy it in an instant. But now I realize that "ideal" device for me just reaches back to my contextual memory of state of the art devices of the time. A time when we couldn't type on a 6" screen, or use a detachable keyboard. So a chiclet keyboard you could thumb type at 40wpm was a revelation. But we have come a long way.

In the end, alas, these devices really are just a novelty, at least for me.

> But now I realize that "ideal" device for me just reaches back to my contextual memory of state of the art devices of the time.

I think as well about that… as well as the work I do that pays my bills, and how efficiently I need to do it to keep my job.

I get nostalgic after Psions. Small clamshell designs are great - I can do work on the go without lugging a fragile laptop!

Well, no, actually - I need to do things in R, _quickly_, at a speed and efficiency that wasn’t possible back in the 90s. And by the time I’m done I don’t have any patience for the virtues of “distraction free computing”!

Edge to edge high resolution screens that can simultaneously show graphics and an terminal and a ChatGPT session. The ability to constantly pipe large datasets into memory to and from disk, while holding up to R’s profligate use of memory.

I’m just not meaningfully productive otherwise. So: I would love this, but it would be a toy that I’m sure I’ll use for a bit while I wax nostalgic about the mythical days people did everything on a VT-100.

I loved my HP 200LX, and I bought a Planet Gemini as well as a GPD Pocket for the same reasons you described.

But I am also 55, and my eyes can't deal any more with a screen less than 11" in a general-purpose computing device (as opposed to a phone or tablet, which have an OS and GUI designed for the small screens), so my portable devices are now a Chuwi Minibook X and a Thinkpad X13. The Thinkpad is a revelationm as despite its size it is lighter than almost anything else, including an iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard.

I get more of a BBC Micro vibe from this than an Amiga one. It's the red keys, probably. Either way, I love the aesthetic, but I have no idea what I should actually do with it.