The PocketMage resurrects the PDA with an e-paper screen

Andrew Liszewski

is a senior reporter who’s been covering and reviewing the latest gadgets and tech since 2006, but has loved all things electronic since he was a kid.

Personal digital assistants like the iconic Palm Pilot were one of many devices we thought went extinct with the arrival of the smartphone. But similar to Canon resurrecting a nearly decade-old digital camera to appeal to point-and-shoot fans, Talisman Design is crowdfunding a clamshell PDA called the PocketMage that combines a tactile keyboard with both e-paper and OLED displays in a pocketable device.

There are two different preorder options for the PocketMage on Crowd Supply, plus you get your choice of parchment (gray) or royal purple accent colors. The $235 version comes fully assembled, while the cheaper $185 version requires you to build it yourself. However, the DIY PocketMage only requires a screwdriver to put together. Soldering skills are not needed, but patience is. Orders placed now aren’t expected to ship until March 2027 at the earliest.

Powered by an ESP32-S3 microcontroller with just 2MB of RAM and 16MB of storage (expandable with a microSD card), the PocketMage is geared toward simple productivity tasks, but is a bit more capable than the earliest clamshell PDAs from companies like Casio. The open-source device comes with apps including a calendar, journal, dictionary, and a Markdown text editor for writing or taking notes. Additional apps like a calculator, ebook reader, and web browser are already available.

The PocketMage’s primary display is a 3.1-inch, 320x240 e-paper screen that forgoes touchscreen functionality for a capacitive touch bar on the side that can be used for scrolling. Above the PDA’s tiny QWERTY keyboard is a smaller 1.8-inch, 256x32px OLED screen used for functions like menus that require a higher refresh rate than e-paper offers. There’s also a basic piezo speaker, a 1,200mAh battery good for about a week’s use between charges, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a USB-C port compatible with peripherals like a larger keyboard. For tinkerers and developers, the PocketMage even includes a powered expansion port for expanding its capabilities with custom hardware.

Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.

Andrew Liszewski