Lilbits: Open mobile hardware, Surface Pro 8 leak, and Apple’s ARM-based Macs

In September hardware hacker bunnie Huang unveiled a new open mobile hardware device called Precursor. Now it’s up for pre-order through a crowdfunding campaign at Crowd Supply.

The early bird $450 rewards are sold out, but you can reserve one for a pledge of $512 or more and if everything goes according to plan, a year from now you’ll receive a hackable/customizable mobile device that’s unlike anything else available at the moment.

Here’s a roundup of recent tech news from around the web.

• Precursor open mobile hardware up for pre-order (crowdfunding) [LinuxSmartphones]
  It’s the size of a phone, but features a physical keyboard, a black and white display, and it’s entirely customizable – you can open it up and change out parts with a screwdriver and program the FPGA to function as several different types of processor. But it’s also slow – like, think Palm Treo, not iPhone 12 speeds. 
• Potential Surface Pro 8 engineering prototype shows up for sale [Windows Central]
  Over the weekend a 2-in-1 tablet that’s allegedly a Surface Pro 8 prototype showed up on eBay. It packs an Intel Core i7-1165G7 Tiger Lake processor, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD in a body that looks identical to the Surface Pro 7.
• This is the Sony Ericsson VAIO smartphone that never came to be [xda-developers]
  10 years ago this Sony Ericcson VAIO smartphone never made it to market. But that keyboard almost makes me wish it had.
• The F(x)tec Pro1 gets official LineageOS 17.1 support [xda-developers]
  F(x)tec Pro1 (the original model, not the new version that’s available with Ubuntu) smartphone is now officially supported by LineageOS 17.1, which means you can run Android 10 on the phone with a slide-out keyboard.
• One More Thing… [Apple]
  Apple is hosting an event on November 10th, when the company is expected to unveil new hardware — possibly the first Mac computers powered by Apple Silicon processors based on ARM architecture.
• Samsung Exynos 1080 launch event [@UniverseIce]
  Report: Samsung will unveil the Exynos 1080 processor at a Nov 12 event in China. The company doesn’t usually hold press events for processors, so maybe this one is a big deal… or maybe Samsung just wants to make it seem like one.
• Kindle Owners’ Lending Library shutting down [Amazon]
  Amazon is shutting down the Kindle Owners Lending Library in January. Launched nearly 10 years ago, the precursor to Kindle Unlimited was a perk for Prime members who owned Kindle or Fire devices, offering a small selection of titles to borrow.
• Playdate update: it’s coming in 2021 [Playdate]
  Playdate handheld game console (with a hand crank) delayed – now expected to be available for order in 2021. But the hardware is pretty much done and the first “season” of games have been locked in.
• PinePhone 3GB/32GB upgrades are now available for purchase [LinuxSmartphones]
  As promised, folks who bought a PinePhone with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage can now upgrade buy purchasing a new mainboard for $80 – $105 and swapping out the part. You can see the entire process in the video below:

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