uConsole Review & Feedback

uConsole
1

I’ve lived with the device for couple of days now and formed a strong opinion on a few important things.

First, the concept is definitely good, there are around none devices on the market that offer this uncompromised experience of having a full PC almost fitting your pocket and suitable for single-handed use**.

The ergonomics are OK but the device is metal with sharp edges and is definitely too heavy. I would very much prefer to have a plastic one. At least late at night I’m confident I have a weapon to protect myself. Not throwing it like a tomahawk but a more traditional melee weapon.

I was surprised with how slow it is. Compared to any cheap $100 noname brand android phone this is just unusably slow. Any UMIDIGI would work, but 8GB RAM CM4 doesn’t. I feel sad for the entire “open source device” ecosystem that this is still a cutting edge of things. I know CM5 is around the corner so I hope I will be able to upgrade. Because this is just nonsense.

The random shutoffs and not fully charged battery problems are I guess solvable. I tried the modules, and then soldered 2x 18wh packs and now using those.

But once I accepted the slowness and heaviness and constant risk of abrupt shutoff, this is exactly what I hoped for - I can do anything I can do on a PC, without changing my experience with my favorite websites and tools, single-handed, while walking my dog in my other hand and visiting random coffeeshops, watching a Korean Starcraft championship while falling asleep, staring at my calendar, reading RSS news on thunderbird, chatting with ChatGPT, and a lot of writing.

The keyboard is on the range of OK to Good, and given there is a none another alternative on the market it makes it PERFECT. I’m able to type general text at about the same speed as on my phone’s glass, and typing professional stuff with extra symbols and abbreviations is just a natural extension so overall I’m like 2x faster to type on it than on my smartphone, and I can code.

As many have already written, the trackball is surprisingly good. Like, unexpectedly, very, very good. Feels so natural to point at any portion of the screen. You think of a location and cursor is there instanty. Just wow, good job with settings and calibration!

The fact that the screen is not a touchscreen and that keys are kinda hard to press is very comforting as I know there will be no random touches (for sure) and keypresses.

Battery runtime on my 2x pack is about 5-6 hours but I believe can be 10-12hrs when not using and brightness is off and throttling with smth like cpulimit. If I can make the batteries charge to 100% it can likely do 15-16 hrs, which makes it par with a regular smartphone.

I’m on wifi constantly connected to my Android phone shared wifi so it is always online. And the fact that Android seamlessly switches between cell and my home wifi while maintaining same hotspot for uConsole feels like future.

6 Likes
2

Try switching out the batteries. The first set of 18650s I tried were duds that would shut off abruptly after 2-3 hours. The second set, a pair of Samsung 35Es, last between 7-8 hours on a full charge and don’t shut off while under load. Admittedly, when buying 18650s there can be a bit of a battery lottery. My duds were also from a reputable brand.

And you should never order 18650s on Amazon, which has policies on shipping raw cells that keep reputable sellers off the site.

The Raspberry Pi 4 was not the fastest computer when it was new. It’s distinction was being cheap and readily available. But if you’re running games, browsing the web or watching video, my recommendation would be to switch the CPU governor mode from Balanced to Performance.

echo performance | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor

You should see a world of difference. For me it’s a more dramatic improvement than overclocking.

1 Like
3

@mikeschnier thank you for the hints! I didn’t know there was as specific issue with Amazon

Also thank for the tip about performance governor. I believe it is “ondemand” by default, or at least where I have it here

Overclocking in my case makes a whole lot of difference, but the device runs hot and tends to shut down much more aggressively.

I’ve soldered 2x 10’000 mAh battery packs instead of the 18650s (that I bought on Amazon) and they seem to do the job, although I am not seeing much of improvement run times over people here who said they were lucky with good 18650’s (it shows like 13hrs idle runtime projected)

I bypassed the fuses on the battery board, and pressed the board connector down harder in hope to reduce resistance, and it seems to have worked, or maybe the battery resistance dropped over time/cycling, in any case I haven’t experienced shutoffs for two days now.

Regarding your note about RPI4 not being the fastest. Well, I expect it to either be fastest or the most power efficient. For example, my Steam Deck is not the fastest computer but runs 10 hours compared to Legion Go’s 3h. RPI4 though is power hungry AND slow. Not sure about the ‘cheap’ statement though, they have a separate line for that. But I do understand that it is hard for open source anything to get access to decent chips, just because of how closed, monopolistic and conspired the ecosystem is. I hope China kicks the competition with RISC-V and makes the Broadcomms/Qualcomms/ARMs move…

4

You’re mainly getting bad battery performance because you have a bad battery. I am getting 7-8 hours of battery life. Switch out your 18650s with something from a hobby store or vape store and you’ll have a better time.

The Raspberry Pi 4’s main distinction is it is cheap (at least before there was a shortage), an order of magnitude cheaper than a Steamdeck. It was fabbed on a 28nm process node, which was not state of the art at the time, and is going to be more power-hungry than a chip with comparable performance fabbed at 5nm.

5

If memory serves the 3D model of the uConsole is available on the net, that means, printing it with a 3D printer is definitely an option. Only the cooling would have to be sorted.

6

Regarding the performance, a lot of it could in theory be addressed by simply “living in the terminal”. Which is easy for someone like me who uses linux on the daily and has developed a habit of trying to do things in terminal to the point I get made fun of when I’m caught openning PowerShell just to something that could also be done just as easily by simply navigating the menus. :grinning:
Now while using console commands is fine and well, it’s the TUI apps where terminal shines, here are few examples:
For RSS feeds and news, there’s newsboat - I mainly use it to subscribe to youtubers more often than not, and have macros set up to either watch the videos by launching mpv (newsboat can pass the url to other programs) or simply downloading the audio and listening to it at my leisure. - for that you’ll need yt-dlp and ffmpeg
The downloaded “podcasts” can be synchronized to other devices using syncthing - by far the best cloud storage alternative that doesn’t rely on big tech’s server like OneDrive, Dropbox and Google Drive.
as I mentioned before mpv is relatively minimal but powerful video player out there - you can use it to watch youtube videos or even twitch streams without having to worry about your resources being eaten by your web browser.
For calendars, you have calcurse - a ncurses-based terminal calendar that also has some todo-list capabilities, however if you plan on synchronizing your calendars with other platforms, calcure might be the better option.
For your e-mails there’s neomutt and alpine - both require some setting up. Neomutt is more geared towards those who prefer vim-keys, where as alpine is slightly easier to set up and offers experience closer to nano
As for text/code editor, I can’t go on without mentioning neovim and helix - both are all you need for your text and code editing needs, and can be extended/customized to your liking - definitely more lightweight options than VSCodium which I personally find overly bloated.
abook - if you want to maintain your contact list in the terminal, this is pretty good option - it can be also configured to work along with neomutt.
lf - my go-to file manager if I need to quickly navigate my file system, though I often catch myself doing simple cd and ls instead but that’s just a muscle memory for me.
pass - your localized password manager. It uses gpg for file encryption - though I heard some opinions about gpg being hot garbage, in that case I’d probably go with keepassxc.

3 Likes