hello all who may be reading this! i hope you’re having a great day. this topic will be a very long log of my adventures in making my MNT Pocket Reform a suitable replacement for my Samsung Note20 Ultra, including instructions and components in how to do the same should you want to. I hope you enjoy this saga (and my title lol) as it’s a monster of a post, and a bit of a love letter to MNT in a way.
this story begins in late 2023, when i was playing TONS of Cyberpunk 2077, and getting really really overzealous with my Netrunner build and getting heavy into modding the game to be even more fun and chaotic, and during this time i thought “i wish i could have something like a cyberdeck”. sure enough, i carry this idea into the winter when i have more downtime spent on my PC and i start researching. i find the Astro Slide, and realizing it’s near exactly what i want, i spent that winter going down the rabbit hole of phones like the PinePhone with the keyboard attachment, and so on, hunting for a phone with a keyboard that can run mainline Linux, including Kali Linux penetration testing tools added in, with the interest of advancing my dream of becoming a cybersecurity and physical security penetration tester, basically being the go to girl for knowing your servers and building are secure. near the end i found out about netbooks and how they’re a staple in Japan, and yet america where i live hasn’t had them since the early 2000s. after finding out about netbooks, i eventually find the subreddit r/cyberDeck, and fell down the rabbit hole once again through the beginning of 2024.
in my search for a very small computer like a netbook or the aforementioned phones, i stumbled upon the abbreviation MNT in a few posts, and i eventually saw it as “MNT Reform”, finally having something i was confident i could google, i finally did so, and found MNT and their new crowdfunding campaign for the MNT Pocket Reform. sure enough i had a “eureka!” moment realizing this is the device i wanted and absolutely had to have. so, i began saving through 2024 fueled by allowance, and autistic nerdy determination that bordered on obsession. through this my parents smartly pointed out “why isn’t there another option?” and so in efforts to disprove them i tried to find alternatives that could work in place of the Pocket Reform. none compared when i tried finding the battery life i wanted, because the second i tried finding batteries of the proper MAH rating, the size requirements doubled or tripled, invalidating the alternative immediately, only cementing my need for the Pocket Reform, and as we come to the end of 2024, i began staring at the hardware documentation for at least a few minutes every day just planning and buying additions to add to the MNT Pocket Reform, including a Quectel RM520-GL cellular modem to add cell functionality through gnome calls and modem-manager-gui, a 2TB SSD by Crucial, and two 10000mah batteries, a 250% increase, i also added a gas scanner to my wishlist to keep an eye on and order later. as black friday comes and with another project of making a full server in my newfound rack homelab finally getting very close to completion, i elect to finish that project by taking advantage of black friday sales before undertaking the Pocket Reform, and it proved a great choice, as i had a lot left over, just not enough for the Pocket Reform, but i got enough money from my parents from the holidays and more saving in between to get the Pocket Reform. i ordered the assembly kit with the poster that very same day.
and at this point, we come to 2025. excitement is flowing, as well as impatience (patience is not one of my virtues), and after many emails back and forth with Plom (shout out to you!), my Pocket Reform finally arrives on March 25th, and i promptly tear open the packaging and turn my desk into a complete disaster before assembling it and adding the SSD. on first boot the first thing i did was move the install to the encrypted NVME, and upon rebooting i promptly deleted wayfire in place of gnome. once that was done and i updated everything, i finally got around to adding the bigger batteries (figured i’d be safe than sorry and install everything on stock batteries for ease of debugging) but i found out the ones i bought were too thick : (, so i began the background hunt for new batteries that would fit.
over the next few weeks, i played with it, molded it into exactly what i wanted, while debugging a few issues i had that @josch very quickly helped me solve on the community forums here (thank you!). and i eventually added the modem, only to realise it’s too long to fit the slot, and so in the spirit of hardware hacking i printed up this little thing
to make the slot longer basically, using the peg to act as the screw holding it into the slot, and the clips holding it down. the entire thing was a 40 minute print on 0.1mm layer height and worked wonderfully. i also was easily able to stick the cell antennas i got off amazon onto the margins of the new style backplates. after i got it installed and confirmed to be working, i added my us mobile sim into the clever little slot on the motherboard and rebooted and made sure everything was set up and ready so when i finally move my number to the new SIM, i can do so quickly and easily. shortly after this the hunt for new batteries came to an end! i found this aliexpress store through a listing for batteries that were almost the right dimensions, and so, i messaged them, asking if they had anything that would fit in the bottom of the Pocket Reform, and sure enough, they got back that they had a 6mm thick, 72mm wide, and 111mm long, 7500mah battery in stock that they could ship me! not as much capacity but still nice. after some saving over the next few weeks and some back and forth the tariffs made them have to relist everything, but with some more messaging they got back with a workaround so i could place an order that day without them having to relist the batteries, so i ordered a few of another listing to get the two batteries i wanted for the same price ($63 USD and some change total for the pair, not bad!).
at this point we’re in May of 2025 and i’ve found a couple stickers to add to my Pocket Reform’s backplates, including a glow in the dark Alastor sticker (i need something Cyberpunk 2077 on there eventually). a few days later my new wifi antennas come because i need to remove the laird antenna to make room for my gas scanner i mentioned previously, but after reviewing performance, they were far worse, so the hunt for new ones continued.
near the end of may i ended up scrolling through the community forums and saw another user state that the pocket reform would fit 122mm long, 65mm wide, 7.5mm thick batteries, and i checked online and found these batteries rather quickly! in the interest of extra capacity, i bought them, and now the ones from aliexpress i ordered earlier will remain for another project. by this time i finally found some wifi antennas that worked, and ordered them along with some nice thermal pads i found which here’s some build photos after i added the batteries, wifi antennas, and thermal pads
i also had to 3D print some spacer bars to get the batteries closer to the temp sensors on the BMS and make sure i had a place to put some double sided adhesive on to hold them in place, and you’ll notice on the antennas that they’ve had some electrical tape surgery to keep them from shorting on something, just in case, though mostly to make me feel better.
now, about this gas scanner you keep hearing about. after staring at the hardware docs for months on end planning mods and additions for when i had the Pocket Reform back in 2024, i realised it had a Qwiic port, and also that i had no idea what that was, and so, after some googling, i found a number of Qwiic components that i thought were awesome, including the SparkFun BME688 Environmental Sensor, and i promptly added it to my wishlist.
this brings us to July of 2025 and since i am seeing a lot of similar modifications on the forums, i’m electing to post this before i get Signal on here, get the cellular functions on, and finish the project in full, as i can always update the post with the finalisations
i’ll update when i add the other components and how i did them, and i hope you enjoyed reading. thanks so much MNT for making something so awesome
