Yep, I weighed the risk of the poor Devterm reviews when deciding to preorder the uConsole. My hope is with the uConsole being a simpler device with a traditional 4:3 display etc there will be more scope to just treat it like a plain ole Linux computer, but absolutely it's a niche toy for me too - neither of the devices make financial sense as a work tool!

I also love the design of the Devterm and would absolutely have bought one if reviews were better.

I have a DevTerm R-01 and it is basically a beautiful $200 novelty cyberdeck that sits on my desk. The R01 version in particular is greatly under powered and is really only usable with twm and a Xterm.

I mostly use it to read gopher:// and the kids love printing things off using it's thermal printer.

How is the keyboard? I have pretty small hands and it does not look like I can use it comfortably.

It's not great but not absolutely horrible. Two-finger typing most of the time and the overall feel is stiff, but not too stiff.

I usually hold it with my hands and use my thumbs, like a Game Gear. Re-mapping the "d-pad" joystick and "yxba" buttons to arrow keys and hjkl [1] makes it easy to read and navigate text content on it (hence of gopher://), especially with the wide and high resolution screen.

1. https://forum.clockworkpi.com/t/mapping-devterm-r-01-gamepad...

It's size is what turned me off most about the devterm. I would be much more tempted by a device just a bit bigger. This[1] blog post has good pictures, one next to a DVD case for size comparison.

[1] https://www.talospace.com/2022/05/mini-review-clockwork-pi-d...

The hardware quality is actually decent. The software support isn’t unless you get the pi version. I’ve owned two. First, the A04 and then the R-01. I actually used the A04 frequently, until I bought a SteamDeck. I’ve since sold it. I would use the R01 more if the HDMI out worked.

Clockwork will ship, it takes them some time. The software support isn’t great, and the community does a lot of the heavy lifting.