So I am a sucker for portable tech. In fact as well as a heap of old Palm PDA's I own things like a Pocketchip and indeed every portable so far released by ClockworkPi. So the latest offering from them, Picocalc was always going to be on my desk too!
It's a fun platform and I think I can really see it getting some traction over the next few years as it's already been hacked around on a lot by the community and it's available for $75. AND, wonderfully, it arrived after a few weeks, much better than my pay now wait 18 months for my Uconsole!
So what is it.. well, It's a Pico compatible handheld that ships with a Pico on board flashed with PicoMite which is essentially a port of MMBasic. Assembly is gorgeous with superb instructions and the build quality is high and typical of ClockworkPi products. It's got a nice screen and you can power it from one or two 18650 cells.
The keyboard has a click but it's pretty nice to use and feels like a spacious thumb-board. You can do a stack on it and it doesn't get to wearing! Oh and the keyboard is back-lit with two brightness levels so it's pretty lovely to work on in low light.
Over on the forum there is LOADS going on with this. There's already lots of different bits and bobs ported to it, Micropython, Lua, Lisp and more. And that's just with the onboard Pico. Tantalisingly (and I have one on my desk for when I get to it) it's possible to insert a Luckfox Lyra board which can run full Linux environments, there's a really active thread where this is being developed very quickly, loads of game emulators, people working on getting WiFi adaptors up and running and more. Amazing.
For me in the week or so since I built mine I've just been tinkering with it in Basic mode, I'm mucking about relearning basic and slowly working on a little suite of calculator scripts for useful things for me (descent rate calculators, parachute design stuff etc). It's such a nice object to tinker on and feels cool to be working with older languages like Basic whilst having modern stuff like a vacuous SD card to save stuff too!