Unfortunately it's sold out. In fact it was only available for a very small amount of time.
this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2025
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Aww dang. I was holding off on getting a T-Deck until Mestastic 2.6 dropped, and would've really preferred an E-Ink version.
How long does it normally take them to restock?
I have absolutely no idea what I'd do with this but I want one.
it is for digital preppers.
IF starlink,3/4/5g,home wifi and everything else is dead...THEN LoRa is your toy.
other than that it might be for the bizarre idea of wizards go hiking or do outside activity. so thats why they produced to few...the story of nerds being outdoors was too unrealistic and prepper incels are just poor.
Disasters do happen. Hurricanes are a big problem that often take out everything you mentioned except for starlink. And starlink has several problems, being owned by a Nazi is certainly one of them.
dont get me wrong, i love lorawan. the device is just super niche and the real life usecase does not really exist or justify creating more ewaste. in desaster regions people are either poor and wont own the device or local phone company can set up mobil towers quickly and it wont matter.
You can also get a cheap truck radio and it will have tremendously more range than meshtastic....most of the time. In a real life death situation, it would also be more reliable.
Don't get me wrong I love meshtastic, but it's more for hobbies.
Yeah I was about to ask what these have on normal radio
The issue with Starlink is power consumption. You will have to run your generator frequently to keep the batteries charged up.
OooOoOo, I’m a hiking/backpacking wizard! Let me tell you, I’ve been waiting for warmer weather to haul radio equipment to mountain peaks to play with. Meshtastic and NOAA sats to be specific.
This is my hobby, too!
Run meshtastic on it
Meh, I already have an ESP32 meshtastic device and that thing chews through the 3000mah battery I have connected. I don't need another power hungry ESP32.
ESP32 can be extremely power efficient but it is a lot of work to throttle them down and get the various sleep modes working right
Dude that is so sick...
Someone please make this into a functioning phone...
Minimal has something similar, but it's unfortunately huge.
I like tha it runs Android, I wish it was the size of this LILYGO device.
Can it run Linux?
My limited research says yes.
This is cool, but how much was it?
From TFA:
$92.64 for the A7682E 4G-capable version and $81.79 for the PCM5102A version
Oh, that's quite cheap! I was afraid it was going to be one of those "cool indie tech" products that costs hundreds of dollars and makes no sense for the consumer except as a cool gimmick. If they can make them a bit cheaper through mass production, this might actually be an alternative.
Given that the Meshtastic team just released a fancy new color UI that they spent about a year on, I'm not sure who this is for, unless someone wants to reskin that UI to work on this monochrome display.
Nice I guess, it adds 4g to the older T-deck. I guess with a SIP client app you could use it as a voice phone. The processor is an ESP32-S3 which has wifi and BLE though the Lilygo article doesn't mention either of those. I almost bought a used T-deck last year but figured it was another thing I didn't have a real use for.
I'd like to see a receive-only POCSAG pager built into a thing like this. I don't know to what extent 1-way pager services still exist in the US, but the idea is that it's a system that sends text messages in the SCA subcarrier of FM broadcast radio stations or sometimes other classes of transmitter. It has mostly been displaced now by cellular phones, but some people like doctors on call still use it, as it is supposed to be more reliable, plus the FM signal penetrates buildings better than cell signals do.
For me though, the main idea is privacy. It is receive-only, so there is no always-on connection sending your location anywhere. People can send you a text and if you're in the coverage area of the FM station, you receive it and can call the person back (in the old days, by finding a landline phone) or whatever. Some of the more expensive plans had regional or nationwide coverage, by broadcasting the message on a whole network of FM stations.
POCSAG itself is a digital protocol for which many software implementations exist, and it doesn't look too hard to write one. So the main challenge is having an RF receiver in the T-deck that gets a frequency where there is a pager service operating in your area.
I don't understand the attraction of small slow epaper displays. I'm fine with regular displays in a thing this size. I'd like to have a 13+ inch epaper tablet but no FOSS ones exist right now afaik.
ha, of course my t-deck plus just arrived today...
If only they had a basic dim backlight...