It's an attempt at producing the real-life thing. IMO a cyberdeck would have no built-in screen but rather provide a good goggles or neural interface. Also would be styled like a music instrument, like a guitar or a synth, for the evil genius rock star look.
Love the auxiliary screen/numpad/controls on the right hand side - very cool. I imagine the screen being used for an Uplink-style 'seconds until hack detected' counter ;)
Looks cool! The Cyberdeck builts I've seen make me wonder if somebody is experimenting with alternative input methods for hand-help devices. Currently to work, you either need a decent surface to put the device and type in a normal (small) keyboard, or be condemned to use thumb-typing or slide-typing in handheld devices which is terrible for anything except maybe for writing English with a spell corrector.
I guess we have chorded keyboards, but not sure how fasts those are for entering text, or if anybody has tried to combine them with a screen into a single hand-held device.
> I guess we have chorded keyboards, but not sure how fasts those are for entering text, or if anybody has tried to combine them with a screen into a single hand-held device.
T9 was blisteringly fast with 12 buttons, a tiny screen, and a rather stupid prediction engine. I'd say we have tried it before, and it worked exceptionally well within the constraints it had. The leaps and bounds made in predictive text since then should make it somewhat viable for other applications.
Some in the cyberdeck community build these as mobile coding stations, for example a way to head to the park or a coffee shop to run emacs without any of the distractions of their regular machines. Some use them as mobile writing machines, like an old school wordprocessor (think Tandy WP1). There's another big portion of the cyberdeck community that's primarily in it for the aesthetics. Or a combination of all of the above. The hobby is kind of about personal computing in the personal, idiosyncratic sense of the word.
There is no specific use (at least for me at the moment). It's just a prop I guess although it's fully functional. The whole thing for me was more the process of building it.
