miss the blackberry? here's beepberry, a pocket-sized computer designed for beeper chatting

Beepberry is a portable e-paper computer

Gadgets of the bygone eras are returning in the same sought-after style but with a twist. Meet Beepberry, a portable computing device decked out in Blackberry fashion with a high-contrast and high-resolution display that likens screens of e-paper devices. Less blue light, more eye-friendly tippy tapping. Beepberry is equipped with a tactile, backlit, and clicky keyboard and a mini touchpad for easy input and navigation and fans who miss typing on clacky keys that make endless tick-tick-tick sounds. Small but packing, Beepberry is a customizable device that can run Raspberry Pi Zero W with a compatible low-profile, solderless header.

Dubbed an everyday hacking gadget, the programable device designed by Eric Migicovsky, the co-founder of Beeper (more about it below), is a side-project turned market product as a portable e-paper computer for hackers and Beeper app fans. Migicovsky says that Beepberry can also run Raspberry Pi Zero W or any other compatible single-board computers such as Radxa Zero and MQ-Pro so long as they have a low-profile solderless header. Additional connectivity can be expanded via USB or GPIO ports such as LTE, 4G/5G, LoRA, Zigbee, and GPS – to name a few – can be expanded and connected via USB or GPIO ports.

images courtesy of Beepberry

Blackberry and beeper in one device

Beepberry may be called a portable computer, but its capacities, so far, are catered more to chat services and networks such as iMessage, WhatsApp, and Signal. Still, it is a hackable handheld cyberdeck that can run any Linux application that runs on the Pi. Based on the tests that the design team has run, Beepberry can also play bit games such as Star Wars and even check the weather in different cities by flashing detailed info on the state of the day.

The pocket-sized e-paper computer, designed with tech collective SQFMI, comes as a mini chum to Eric Migicovsky’s Beeper app which is a universal chat software that integrates all chat services into a single app. Inside Beeper, a clutter-free inbox awaits the users as it combines all the chat windows from different apps such as Whatsapp, Messenger, Twitter, iMessage, Android SMS, and Telegram – to name a few – so that they don’t need to switch between windows to check other messages.

In this way, users can keep track of all the incoming messages, plus Migicovsky and his co-founder Brad Murray add a search button so users can easily find the messages that they’re looking for. By installing Beeper on Beepberry, users are reminded of the golden days of Blackberry and beepers at once, pulling out the e-paper computer from the pockets to fire off a reply or read a text without straining their eyes.

Eric Migicovsky, the designer of beepberry, collaborates with tech collective SQFMI to create the device