To those who currently have their MNT Pocket Reform: Could you please take a moment to share your initial observations and experiences with the device? I, and I suspect others, would be grateful for your time and perspective.
Specifically, I would be interested in hearing from those with substandard eyesight about how practical the screen size has been during usage.
My eyesight is very poor (-10 diopters each eye and astigmatism) though well corrected by glasses.
I mostly work in the terminal and can read the builtin screen well enough with a full screen terminal using the default font set to around 100x30 characters.
I touch type and find the builtin keyboard a little cramped. I think switching to the custom layout I normally use on my daily Planck ortho mech keyboard will alleviate some of that.
However, I’ve plugged the Pocket into my KVM where in works very well indeed with my 27" Monitor, trackball ergo mouse and Planck keyboard. It’s also plenty fast for what I do - programming in C and Lua primarily.
I just need to unbrick the keyboard when I get back from vacation to make more use of it 
For the size, it is great. The keyboard is small, but I really got used to the layout very fast. For it’s size … the screen is great. Looks very sharp an clear. I love the trackball
Thank you. This information is very helpful, as my usage of the device will be similar to yours. I would be interested to know the amount of battery life you are achieving with that type of usage if you’ve been able to gauge it. I intend to pair it with a power bank during portable sessions anyway, so I suppose it doesn’t make much of a difference, but I’m curious nonetheless. Also, I’m pleased to hear you were able to utilize an external monitor. Thank you again for your valuable insights.
Wonderful. I must admit that the keyboard and trackball are among the most appealing features of the Pocket Reform to me, so thank you for sharing that information.
Neither of my older power banks worked with the Pocket, but I bought a 100W 20Wh UGreen PD 2.0 & PD 3.0 powerbank from Amazon for around $50 which certainly has enough power to fully recharge the Pocket once, probably twice though I haven’t measured it carefully with only the Pocket charging from it yet. From 100% charge and fully unplugged, I get close to 4hrs from the Pocket’s own batteries with very light use (terminal, neovim, firefox).
I’m sure, with the powerbank, all day use will be no problem at all!
The pocket reform is probably the coolest computer i own. I love that i have source and schematics for the system controller and keyboard, and it is so very repairable/modifiable.
It’s also a great development platform for double checking that the code i write is portable to ARM. The keyboard takes some getting useful, but it’s so cute it’s worth it (and it’s a small change from the planck keyboard I use on my work computer)
I only received my unit today so I don’t have much to say yet except that the screen is bright and easy on the eyes. The keyboard is tiny but nice to type on after some practice.
I only own some old laptops so I was not prepared in the charger department. I had to order a new USB C charger. I went with a UGreen as it seems to be a popular option around here.
I am positively surprised regarding the clarity of the screen. Mostly fiddle in terminal - hacking some rust using helix editor. Screen is much better than I expected. I am not a good typist but love the keyboard - size is obviously not large but grooves are nice. The trackball is quite precise - I use a logitech ergo mouse on one my larger computers - so comfy with trackballs. I love the metallic haptics of the case. While not being the typical “artsy” person strangely enough i like the selectable keyb lighting together with the (in my case) black chassis. Speed is somewhere around my raspi 4 but slower than my raspi 5 - so obviously not a threadripper competitor. I flip between my tuxedo 17inch i9 beast and my sweet hackable pocket reform - warmly recommended …
I agree with many of your opinions here!
Same here, the few minutes I was able to play with my MNT Pocket I was astonished by the sharpness of the display!
With my Thinkpad Transnote it’s definitively one of the coolest I own too, I can’t wait to dig enough in the schematics to learn how to tweak it and make it truly mine.
My Pocket Reform died after 5 minutes of usage and I’m still troubleshooting the issue so it’s a bit frustrating not being able to use it, but I’m really glad that it exists and after months of waiting it’s only a little stepback.
In the meantime here’s what I think could be nice in a Pocket Reform v2 :
Issues from the fist 24h:
I just got my Pocket Reform last night. I really love it already, customer for life. 
I really like it comes with Debian and has KiCAD files available. That is the deal clincher for me.
My eyes aren’t so great either. The screen is very crisp and clear. Very happy with that.
The keyboard layout is going to take awhile to get used to (I keep hitting HYPER for CTRL), but it feels good.
The trackball, which I haven’t used in forever, is also great. I have used Thinkpads in the past, and prefer this trackball over it. I also like this trackball more than touchpads.
I wish the ethernet was RJ45, but perhaps they didn’t have space. I don’t use wifi here, just ethernet. It would be nice to not have to carry a rare ethernet cable with it, when I have a bunch of RJ45 everywhere.
Also, for some reason more likely related to Debian sid and/or gnome-network, it wouldn’t take a DHCP address on ethernet. I added the address to the dhcpd server, saw the Pocket request an IP and get assigned it, but gnome network just would spin and spin and never use the IP. Running this would get an IP immediately:
dhclient end1
It would be nice if the openssh-server was installed out-of-the-box to make it easier to get going. If zstd was installed by default, it could be used instead of gzip when building the kernel initrd when doing updates. Maybe consider also adding nvme-cli, fdisk, and lshw by default, but no big deal.
I was surprised to see that non-free-firmware Debian repo was enabled. I’m not sure what blobs (if any) it is pulling from there.
The login screen says use F12 for power, but there is no F12. According to the docs (p. 9), that maps to HYPER+w, but that doesn’t work for me. The docs also say F10 is HYPER+10, but they probably mean HYPER+0.
This is probably unique to me, but I was trying to get openbox installed. I was able to get it launched, but it was rotated 90 degrees. The mouse cursor also left a trail on the screen, so that’s not usable. I haven’t poked at it much yet.
I am charging it with a PinePower desktop power supply. It reads 19.9V and 1.5A when charging.
You can check what is installed from non-free-firmware by running this:
apt-cache show '?section(non-free-firmware) ?installed' | grep '^Package: '
The table at Modularity—MNT Research GmbH shows that for the imx8mplus, ddr blobs and wifi firmware are non-free.
I’ll look into this. I opened this issue to keep track of that: install `nvme-cli`, `fdisk`, and `lshw` (#27) · Issues · Reform / reform-system-image · GitLab
It only shows firmware-realtek installed, but afaict, it isn’t actually used.
Awesome-o. Maybe openssh-server too, but disabled by default ala systemctl disable ssh.service. And zstd will save a bit of disk (and maybe be faster?) for the initrds.
Thanks!!
The root filesystem you are using is the same on other modules. The firmware-realtek package is required on a311d (which you can also put into your pocket reform). The firmware that you are using on your imx8mplus pocket reform comes from the reform-qcacld2 package which is from the MNT repositories. If you were using Debian stable (bookworm) from reform.debian.net, then the required firmware would come from the ezurio-qca-firmware package (currently in NEW).
I didn’t put openssh-server into the list because it requires an order of magnitude more disk space compared to the other 3 utilities. I created a list in the issue.
You are right, compared to gzip, zstd when used with the initramfs on a311d is:
Decompression difference, while sounding large, is only 0.8 seconds. But the zstd package is small. I’ve added it to the list for potential inclusion. @minute has to make the final call.
@josch, thank you for the detailed explanations!
my initial impressions:
the back panel does get a bit hot, its not an immediate danger since its not sitting on my lap and all the heat is in the top half, but touching the back while its under load is very hot, even idling it is a bit uncomfortable. I worry if I put any stickers on the back they will peal off.
I swapped out for the A311D from my big reform after using the MPlus, and its definitely more powerful, handling image heavy pages and youtube better. Idle power consumption also looks like its 1.5 watts more efficient - 6.3w vs 4.6w - on low brightness, using an nvme. Would be great if emmc boot can be enabled for the A311D to free up the microsd card slot.
whole thing feels nice and solid, clicky keyboard is great though will take a bit to get used to with the smaller keycaps, setup experience is quick and everything is immediately ready to go.
I feel like the setup should offer to flash to the internal nvme if detected - personally that’s always the first thing I do when completing setup.
I can’t find any info on audio keybinds in the manual? I see them in the sway/wayfire configs, but I don’t think the pocket keyboard sends media key commands. There is a default brightness keybind, working default volume keybinds would be good too, or volume/brightness buttons in the way/swaybar, popping open pauvcontrol is a pain.
I get ghosting on the display when viewing the MNT forums from the pocket and then switching tabs, I see the ghost logo for a bit. I don’t think burn in is a concern because these are IPS panels, but its a bit odd.
love the device, will be tinkering on it for a while, I have my dev environment and even my preferred pixel art program - aseprite - running under box64 without issue. waiting on a sim card and antenna to mess with a internal modem.