Personal digital assistants such as the once-iconic Palm Pilot largely disappeared with the rise of the smartphone, but a small maker called Talisman Design is attempting to revive the category. The company is crowdfunding a clamshell device called the PocketMage on Crowd Supply, pairing a tactile keyboard with both e-paper and OLED displays to offer a pocketable, distraction-free alternative to a smartphone. It joins a wider trend of resurrecting supposedly obsolete gadgets to appeal to users seeking simpler, more focused devices.

The PocketMage comes in two preorder options — a fully assembled version at $235 and a self-build kit at $185 that needs only a screwdriver rather than soldering — with a choice of parchment (grey) or royal purple accents, and shipping not expected before March 2027. It runs on an ESP32-S3 microcontroller with 2MB of RAM and 16MB of storage (expandable via microSD), and the open-source device ships with apps including a calendar, journal, dictionary and Markdown editor, plus optional extras such as a calculator, ebook reader and web browser. Its main display is a 3.1-inch, 320×240 e-paper screen with a side-mounted capacitive touch bar for scrolling, supplemented by a 1.8-inch OLED strip above the QWERTY keyboard, while a 1,200mAh battery lasts about a week, alongside Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a piezo speaker, USB-C and a powered expansion port.