Notebooks are now available in a wide variety of sizes and at very different prices. The Pocket Z is a DIY project that aims to create an affordable and compact laptop system. It is based on devices such as the HP Jornada 720 or the Sharp Zaurus - compact devices with numerous functions that could well be subsumed under the 'PDA' term.

The Pocket Z is intended to be a Linux notebook with sufficient computing capacity to display a Linux desktop environment. The screen must not have too high a resolution and the keyboard provided is very much a notebook-style keyboard. According to the proposed requirements, the compact device is intended to be rather cheap, with $99 set as the goal. Charging will be via USB-C. Two different model versions are planned, namely a seven-inch and a five-inch model.

As prototypes already exist, it is already more than a model on paper. A seven-inch screen with a resolution of 1,024 x 600 is installed, which is a touchscreen. A Raspberry Pi Zero 2W is used as the computing chip, running Raspberry Pi OS Lite with XFCE and Conky - not a very powerful setup. The Raspberry Pi Zero 2W also comes with additional connections, which should be very advantageous for makers. The layout of the keyboard is similar to that of a calculator, so the system is probably not particularly suitable for entering very long texts.