Crowdfunding campaign for PDA smartphone with keyboard achieves target

The Indiegogo campaign for the Gemini device has reached its goal of $200,000. The device, which resembles a PDA, was co-designed by Martin Riddiford. He was previously involved in the design of the Psion Series 5 PDA in the 1990s.

The Gemini is a device that can be folded in half and that has a physical QWERTY keyboard. According to the makers, this concerns a ‘full tactile keyboard’, which resembles the copies in earlier PDAs. The device should be available in two variants, one of which will only have Wi-Fi and the second will also support 4G. The Gemini features the same 5.7″ screen as the LG G6, which has a resolution of 2880×1440 pixels.

Furthermore, the device runs on a Helio X20-soc from MediaTek with ten cores, of which two Cortex A72 cores at 2.5GHz, four A53 cores at 2GHz and four at 1.55GHz. In terms of memory, the Gemini has 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, which can be expanded with a micro-SD card. In addition, there is support for wifi-ac, bluetooth 4.0 and nfc. The device has two USB-C ports and it is possible to take photos with a five-megapixel camera. The battery is an 8000mAh one, bringing the total weight of the device to 400g.

The operating system is Android, but there is an option to run Linux in a dualboot configuration as well. The software is provided by Private Planet. The cost of a Gemini is $350 for backers, which is $250 less than the final sale price. The device should be delivered in November of this year.