We are currently following the NXP IMX downstream kernel, that is why you can check the 'imx-' prefix on our branch, their releases follow 6 months after the LTS release. NXP IMX 6.18 will release roughly by end of March, when it does you will see us updating to 6.18 as well. By the time we ship, we mostly likely will be shipping 6.18.
Now we do intend to upstream, we've even got mainline u-boot to start working with the device albeit the display. We were waiting for the hardware configuration to be stabilized before we submit the device trees and start actively working on mainline support. It won't happen overnight but you will see our documentation clearly defining how far we are from the mainline. Also to add here, compared to other SOCs, NXP already has very good mainline support.
I had a poke around the u-boot and linux repos they share, and it looks like the changes from mainline are pretty minimal - mostly related to device trees and configuration. That's to be expected for any custom board.
Obviously if the company died before this stuff was mainlined, then someone would need to maintain it. But from what I've seen everything you'd need is out there already.
It comes with a good, proven BB keyboard. No option for GPIO pins or gamepad module, but I don't need such anyway. Instead, what I have in it is a USB hub which fits nicely in the side.
Unfortunately, the RPi CM I had lying around were CM4 with eMMC or CM5 w/o WiFi/BT. So I bought a new CM5, with 16 GB RAM. That was end of last summer. I'm not sure I'd bother now, given the RAM prices which surely affected CM5 prices. Actually, I should probably sell those for profit, since they're not doing anything.
How are they going to fund 7 years of support for a device that sells maybe a few thousand units? How are they going to guarantee they will still be around, and interested in maintaining the device drivers in 2033?
The Linux kernel project will remove the device drivers from the mainline kernel if they are no longer actively maintained and in use. So it is very likely that the support will be dropped from the mainline kernel way before 2033, as there probably won't be any users of this device remaining, and the original developers long gone.
Call me negative, but I expect that this company wil just vanish after some time. The team will just move on, maybe even start again under a different name, but there will be nobody to be held responsible for promises and claims they made in the past.
I learned my lesson with this niche market after CHIP: https://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Features/Exploring-the...
These clowns didn’t even tell anyone they went out of business, it took someone going to their listed address in person who found the office had been completely gutted to get ready for the next tenant.
I want to want it but I fear it would just sit on my desk. Does anyone have cool ideas for uses?
You are right though, ive loved tinkering especially some if the cool linux based handhelds but i always come back to mobile/tablet because my limiting resource is time and android/ios kinda just works.
No idea what I'm going to use it for, possibly as a mobile Kali setup or something
There are a bunch of them added to the Kickstarter page, check them out!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mecha-systems/mecha-com...
We are updating them on Kickstarter
https://mecha.so/comet#hardware
https://mecha.so/comet#use-cases
Bunch more are incoming as do more tests, will add them in soon
Or Moto Z
I have to say though: I like the communication of the Mecha Comet team here (and the UI). I wish them the best.
[1] https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/the-other-half-returns-commun...
Reminds me also of Motorola's attempt to have a hardware-expansible phone a few years ago, the Moto Z range and Moto Mods.
https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/gadgets-computers-software/25...
Obviously this is much more open than the proprietary moto-z stuff.
They've got a grab-bag of unrelated Linux etc. org icons - Nix, Debian, postmarketOS, Node, Kubernetes… You could argue that someone _could_ run Nix or Node on it, but Debian is just nerdbait. It's not relevant to the product they're selling, unless you're gonna wipe the disk and support it yourself.
Could you tell me which section it was? I'll fix it
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mecha-systems/mecha-com...
(and the super early bird rewards are all gone)
I might be interested if I weren't still waiting on the Soulcircuit Pilet to ship....
I travel a lot and manage servers, so I’ve been wanting a dedicated “SSH machine” that I can always carry with me. With how good AI tooling has gotten, doing real work on a tiny device is suddenly very viable. The other day I SSH’d into a box from my phone while I was at the gym and just told Claude Code to fix a Kubernetes manifest issue. It was fixed and deployed in under two minutes.
I mentioned this idea at work and a few coworkers immediately said they’d buy one if it existed. Curious what others think.
For the IMX8MP - The pinephone was 1.2 GHz, this is 1.8 GHz on all four cores. As far as geekbench goes it hits between the Pi 3 and Pi 4, faster EMMC and LPDDR4 gives it a bigger boost compared to the Pi 3. The PCIe 3.0 is also there. Yes it is not equivalent to a desktop use, but for a phone sized usecases, the processor has not been a bottle neck. The advantage you get is a battery life that goes 7 hours on idle with the display on, and on sleep it can go upto 8D and wake up instantly.
The IMX95 is 6x A55 at 1.8GHz but you can check the geekbench below, it matches the single core performance of Pi 4 and beats it at multi-core performance while offering LPDDR5. But at the same time, is only 15% more power hungry than the 8MP.
So the way we see it -
Pi 3 < Comet 8MP < Pi 4 < Comet 95 < Pi 5
Ref: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/15259040?baseli...
Edit: The IMX95 is 6-cores A55 and not 4-cores
Have you noticed something similar? do you listen to music on your L5?
Edit: I should also mention it does this regardless of audio out the internal DAC+3.5mm TRS, or over a USB MBox attached to a dock. It seems to be something quite low-level disabling interrupts for too long, something like that.
I've been meaning to make a post about this on X for some time, so I went ahead and did it tonight. If you want to head over there and see the renders of what I'm thinking: https://x.com/TroyCherasaro/status/2016767340457980403
A phone where I can install applications without asking Google for permission.
> DIY Phone
> Use the Comet and the Linux stack for calling*, messaging and mobile data as an alternate to your walled and closed smartphone. Contribute to the Linux ecosystem for mobiles.
So I guess this means it can, but it's not supported and you need to contribute the software. So perhaps it has the hardware, and perhaps it might work.
Or course you can attach a USB stick with a 5G modem in it. To be fair, this makes things really difficult. Not all modems support all bands. Different countries use different 5g bands, etc
interesting would be if i can put nixos onto it but keep using their launcher...
My goal is to use it to control this Quad-legged walker, possibly ROS.
https://mecha.so/comet#use-cases
I'll add pictures/videos of the examples we've internally tested in a bit!
I didn't realize I could potentially use it as a highly hackable phone. Whats the battery life like?
EDIT: I just went ahead and pledged my support. I wanna see you guys succeed.
Anything with USB-A is neat with this type of device. For example, a LimeSDR USB would work (even a uSDR for M.2, though I'd wait for the successor).
For Kali, I sport a GPD Pocket 2, and that works well, but I'm in the process of switching that to my Hackberry Pi CM5.
Still, I bought that end of last summer. I honestly would not buy any computer right now. The RAM prices are simply insane.
Looks rad, but I have a Legion Go which I can play any game I want and tinker on. This seems like it would be a worse version of that, but also not a useful phone replacement.
There are so many cool vaguely scifi tech projects one could build these days but almost none of them have actual utility. : (
> LTE or 5G Modems
> Add mobile data and calling support to your Comet. Bring your own modem and antenna or use our standard LTE upgrade kit.
You can also slap a keyboard onto an existing phone. I have tried vibe coding via ssh from my iPhone and honestly it’s not terrible at all. Instead of doom scrolling I can build things.
Second, their BIOS is a beta version of a commerciel BIOS, lol. As such, it doesn't have Intel SGX enabled.
That said, it served me as cyberdeck before cyberdecks were all the rage, and before they were easy and cheap to build. It stems from a time when ARM64 wasn't still as powerful as the current (approx) decade. Of course the machine has some downsides for 2026 standards. 2x USB-A, 1x USB-C, for example. I'd rather have 2x USB-C, since you use one for power. I also modded the device for better thermals, and have replaced the battery. The machine sits behind 8 philips screws.
One cool thing the GPD Pocket 3 and GPD Pocket 4 have, is similar to what Framework has: a modular port, where you can keep the form factor but gain KVM, RS232, etc.
The base variant of the Mecha Comet comes with very little storage and RAM:
> This is the base variant with 2GB RAM and 64GB Storage.
And a relatively slow i.MX8. If you want to go with the quicker i.MX95 you're better off with:
> This is the base variant with 4GB RAM and 64GB Storage.
But that one is 50 EUR more, and still comes with only 64 GB storage and 4 GB RAM. My GPD Pocket 2 in 2018 came with 8 GB RAM and 128 GB storage (which isn't much nowadays).
As for the screen in that machine, compare:
> 6th generation Corning Gorilla Glass, AF anti-fingerprint coating, 10-point touch, 500 nits brightness
with
> 3.92" AMOLED Display (550 nits), Capacitive Touch
The screen of this machine, while small (4") seems quite decent.
And if you want to emulate any Android apps which are ARM (which you could with Waydroid, if you have pref. 8 GB RAM on your machine), then you better run ARM. You can emulate x86-64 on ARM with decent performance (tried recently with Qemu on a RPi 4, and my daily driver is a MBP M1 variant) but the other way around is not feasible.
Any reason really to have a separate device for this?
If you perform pentests or red teaming, a mobile device with CLI access is very useful (whether a smartphone is suffice I leave up to the reader). If you are using the device non-mobile, you could attach an external screen and keyboard to it (and perhaps pointer device, I like the Apple Magic Trackpad, even on Linux it works well these days). That way, you could for example write your pentest report on the machine while not fscking up your eyes. Also remember: if you got WLAN or 5G you can get access to more horsepower. It is not as if you were going to run hashcat on these devices locally. You can also run SSHd (and even remote desktop, I guess) on the machine and admin it like that from a fully blown computer. You could also use it with SDR, or for example for reverse engineering (which you could do in a VM as well, if you prefer).
Personally, I think this device would be pretty cool for a kid to learn Linux on (better than the Hackberry Pi CM5 which I got). The UI is neat, there's a CLI, and they can game on as well as explore on it. Pretty good deal a ~250 EUR machine to learn Linux on, as well as game. Remember: if it is ARM, it can run all the Android apps via Waydroid. No emulation or x86-64 Android versions necessary. I see it as a successor to Clockwork Pi GameShell [1] in that regard, as even the 2 GB RAM version is more powerful. That device had only 1 GB RAM, and:
> Introducing new Clockwork OS, based on Debian 9 ARMhf and Linux mainline Kernel 4.1x. You can run PICO 8, LOVE2D, PyGame, Phaser.io, Libretro, and many other game engines smoothly.
There's the Clockwork uConsole [2] as well, and you can put a RPi CM 3 or 4 in it. The A-04 variant specifically seems akin to the Mecha Comet i.MX 8 variant.
> A-04 ARM64-bit Quad-core Cortex-A53 1.8GHZ 4 Mali-T720 2GB DDR3
The RISC-V variant only has 1 GB RAM, the other variants got 4 GB DDR4.
Both the uConsole and the Mecha Comet are candybar format. Compared to Clockwork Pi's Devterm and GPD Pocket series which are clamshell. The Mecha Comet however allows you to easily swap the keyboard with a gamepad. The Clockwork devices don't allow this; they're tailored for either keyboard candybar, keyboard clamshell, or gamepad (candybar).
I can completely understand the skepticism, any startup today releasing something and promising to support will be taken with a grain of salt. I cannot guarantee that Mecha will not run out of business in 7 years. But at the very least we have the confidence to commit to 7 years of support, if we are able to keep the show going.
Why we are confident of extending this support -
1. The SOC from NXP is widely used in automotives and industries. Their support is listed till 2036, https://www.nxp.com/products/nxp-product-information/nxp-pro... which means their downstream will keep seeing updates. In above comment I mentioned that they follow 6 months+LTS release dates. To give an example, IMX6 that were released in 2011 are still actively supported in 2026. You can even buy SOMs and are still deployed in production.
2. The WiFi chip we are using is NXP IW612, again has longevity till 2038, which means it will still see its driver being updated and maintained.
3. Our audio codec is from Analog (MAX98090) again widely used and in production.
4. Most of our usb and power controllers are from TI, which can be expected to be around in the kernel for a long time.
5. None of the parts we've used are not recommended for new design or obsolete or come from unknown vendors. A lot of care has been taken in choosing the right parts?
From my point of view our work in supporting is to ensure we pull changes, run our test suites, see if everything works and repeat. What am I missing? There are no device drivers built that are exclusive to the Comet at this stage. You can review our device trees on our repos.
Also, we have a longer roadmap ahead of us - selling few thousand units in 5 days is no indicator of how things will be in the future. We are betting on this hardware and more hardware that we release later.
You can sit on the fence and keep expecting us to fail, that is your prerogative. But that doesn't automatically imply that we are ill-prepared.
(edit: formatting)
You might very well be right about the company, it is the likely outcome after all for all companies. But if the kernel support is seeded properly there should be a bit more time than predicted even then.
Also, positively: They did the communication on the website really well (I stumbled over the comet before), extended it nicely and the kickstarter campaign seems to be a big success. They have a good chance to stick around.
We haven't because it isn't primarily a phone. But we will eventually. But the folks at PlaMo are testing their dialer app and it works fine.
https://discord.com/channels/1163379146106359858/13975741030...
We are currently testing with LTE modem (Quectel EM05). We are yet to test with 5G Modems but similar sized 3042 (M.2) are available albeit expensive.
I'd still probably carry a main phone, but this could be a cool backup
Also, you are free to bring your own modem too - and only opt for the antennas pre-assembled in your unit.
You've pretty much sold me on the device, but I might wait for retail.