A smartphone suitable for geeks with a return to past in design. Let’s talk about the new Pro1 X , the phone recently presented by the company F (x) tec in collaboration with the famous website XDA Developers . It is truly one of a kind and clearly brings your mind back to Nokia’s past. In this case the Pro1 X opens via a sliding movement of the screen towards the rear and is equipped with a 5, 99 inches with a resolution of 2160 × 1080 pixel , but also a QWERTY keyboard a 66 keys arranged in five rows. On a technical level, it is in possession of an old Qualcomm Snapdragon chip 835 and has 6 GB or 8 GB GB of RAM LPDDR4X and 128 GB or 256 GB of UFS 2.1 memory which can also be expanded by using a card microSD.

Pro1 X: the return to the past for the “ geeks ”

But what makes the Pro1 X unique is not only the presence of an extended physical QWERTY keyboard which these days is really a thing of the past but certainly also the use of operating systems different from the classic Android one, however present. In this case the options are LineageOS or Ubuntu Touch. The first is we can define it as a customized Android with advanced controls while the second offers users the functionality of a Linux PC to all the effects.

Pro1 X has an optimized launcher that allows you to use the device with the screen horizontally. Not only because there are also some customizable shortcuts even if in this case not all Google applications on Android will be optimized for the physical keyboard and therefore it will be quite difficult to be able to take full advantage of the device from this point of view. Nothing lost since the new Pro1 X can be connected to a display using a USB Type-C cable and used as a normal Linux PC. The touchscreen display can act as a trackpad, while the keyboard can be used for text entry.

At a photographic level, the sensors of Pro1 X are not very effective since we are talking about a main camera from 12 MP (Sony IMX 363), a 5MP focus sensor, an LED flash and an 8MP front camera. But it is clear that the smartphone is oriented towards something other than video and photo use. It’s a smartphone for nerds and it’s connectivity and its operating system that matter in addition to capable hardware.

The new Pro1 X should start to be launched on the market from March 2021. In any case, an 8GB version and 256 GB of smartphone is available for 499 dollars down on Indiegogo, although the final price of the device will be 799 dollars. Salty perhaps given the somewhat dated hardware.