The first product was the Brax 3 phone, which was the most successful phone project ever introduced on indiegogo.com. It was a difficult learning experience to build new devices, and let me tell you, the deck was stacked against us succeeding. It was not without its challenges. But in the end, the product sold out, and we’re now releasing the second batch in March. And I personally use a Brax 3 for my daily, and it’s actually pretty awesome. So, I’m happy to announce that Brax Technologies is proceeding with the next project called Brax Open Slate. This device is a tablet.

It’s similar in size to an Apple iPad, but the screen is projected to be 12-inch diagonal, which is a bit larger. However, this is not intended to be some iPad replacement. No siree. This one will be chock full of ports, immense battery life, bright screen, NPU. This will be so capable that it really needs to be considered as a laptop substitute as well. But the real big difference is the privacy and security features that make this unique. There really will not be any device like it in the market today. Let’s jump into the details. Hardware details.

First, let’s get into some general specs. Now, the fine detail of these specs may change, but these have all been verified by the factory, so there may be just a few variations. This is the rendition of the Open Slate design. Just like the Brax 3, the industrial design focuses on openness. So just like the open source OS that it will be using, the innards will be visible through the see-through opening in the back. Again, the size of the screen is 12-inch diagonal, so as I said, that’s bigger than an iPad. It’s slightly smaller than an ultra-portable laptop, which is typically a 13-inch, and it will be a Gorilla Glass display.

Things you will notice even from this picture is that there’s a compartment on the left side. And that, my friends, is a removable battery, and you can see the latch to open that to the right of the cover. The battery is an 8,000 mAh battery, so that’s more than double the size of a phone battery. You will also notice on the right side that there’s an M.2 slot, and that will be freed up. You will be able to attach your own M.2 device. For example, though the unit will ship with flash storage already, you can add your own SSD drive, so you can easily expand it to multi-terabytes of storage.

And if that’s not enough, this is not in the photos, but there’s also an SD card slot. So we’re talking about extreme expansion here. This is no iPad. This can be quite a capable machine. You can see in the photos that it has a rear camera. And what you will not see is that there’s also a front-facing camera, and this I expect to be the same quality as a phone camera, similar to Rex 3. So this is not like the really bad cameras they put on laptops. The device is expected to weigh about 1.5 pounds, so this is not some heavy laptop.

Now let’s flip the device around, and here’s the first surprising difference with any tablet in existence. Here you see five switches. These are kill switches, folks, so you can turn off the camera, mic, GPS, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi independently. So depending on your use, if you have no reason to use a GPS, because you’re indoors, why have that on? Why have a risk the camera’s turned on by some rogue app? No possibility here, as there are hardware switches to turn off the power to those modules. And maybe not obvious here, but this is a device that has sensors, mobile sensors.

So it’s like a mobile device, even though it’s in a laptop format. By the way, you will notice too that the case is secured by screws, so it should be a simple matter to disassemble this and access the innards. Again, open architecture. Let’s turn this around again and show you the ports. Now, the designer kind of went overboard here and put five USB-C ports and a USB-A port, so this will not be a final version. This is still being decided. But there will be a mix here of 3.2 Gen, Gen 2, and DisplayPort, and Power USB-C.

Without using this as a final count of ports, suffice it to say that this is more ports than you will find on your typical laptop, and definitely blows any Apple device away. If they want to take away your ports, we will bring it back, and you will see the 3.5mm jack for your headphones. So you’ll be able to attach a multitude of devices to this, including SSD storage, extra monitors, power, security keys. The options are endless. Just to note that the device is thicker than an iPad-type device, and the reason is that there has to be room for the swappable battery, so that’s a deliberate design choice.

Now let’s talk about the CPU and internal specs you cannot see. This device is an ARM device, so the same technology that powers your phone, or the Snapdragon PCs from Qualcomm, or the M series chips from Apple. This specific CPU is the MediaTek Genio 720, which actually is so new, it’s not yet in any device. So by the time this product is released, it will be one of the first devices to use this chip. This is a modern MediaTek model, and actually includes features like a security chip and enhanced security modules you’ll find in the latest phone chips.

The least expensive model will ship with 8GB of RAM up to 16GB of RAM. RAM unfortunately is extra expensive this year, so just be aware of that limitation, and RAM nowadays is typically soldered in. The flash storage is 128GB up to 256GB, but as I already mentioned, there’s an M.2 slot. It’s no big deal to plug in a 2TB NVMe drive, if you wish. The battery is 8000mAh and is rated for about 20 hours of use. The battery is intended to be swappable. And it is designed to accept a keyboard, a stylus pen for the touchscreen, and perhaps not obvious, but it should support a mouse and trackpad too.

The screen is an IPS 2.4K resolution display with 450 nits, so this is the same level of brightness and quality as an iPad, and that matches the screen resolution of a current Apple Retina screen. So for media use, this will be an awesome device. The hardware features codecs for 4K 60fps video, so no limitations there. The CPU includes an NPU with nine tops. This is actually built to handle AI inference, so your AI applications will be powered just fine. This should apply to photo-related AI tools. It should also be capable of running an Olama local AI, like a 7 billion model.

Now here’s where this solution shines. Brac’s open slate will feature a choice of Android or Linux, and I will talk about the specific plans here. On the Android side, we will release it with Brac’s OS. This will be a fully open source OS, and will have all the characteristics of a de-googled OS. So it should function similarly to a Brac’s 3, just with different hardware drivers. Because it’s using Brac’s OS open source, it should be possible for EOD OS and Ubuntu Touch to port to this device, if you wish to use those variants.

That’s already been done on Brac’s 3, so we know this is all doable. The advantage of a Brac’s OS Android version on the tablet is that the apps will be what you would expect are available on Android. So if the mobile app ecosystem is important to you, then this is the way to go. Brac’s OS, as expected, will have no Google Play Store, but unpaid Google Play apps will be available via our own Brac’s OS store. Being a larger-sized device with keyboard and mouse options, though, it opens up to users that typically aren’t critical to mobile devices, such as word processing and so on, which, of course, you will easily be able to do here.

Currently, as being set up by MediaTek, this CPU is being supported by a development version of Linux called Yocto. But the interesting thing is that MediaTek is a partnership with Canonical, so Canonical is actually creating an Ubuntu flavor for this Genio ARM chip. It will be a regular release of Ubuntu for ARM. Because Linux for ARM is not commonly supported out of the box, other distros will likely not run unless they port themselves to this ARM release or fork the Ubuntu version, or Yocto version. But having native support from a well-known Linux distro like Ubuntu is a massively big deal.

Then we’ll be assured of Linux capability with most of the common apps we expect to use on a laptop or desktop Linux. Currently, even Qualcomm’s Snapdragon PC does not supply a Linux version, so Linux on ARM is not exactly common today. But through the direct work between MediaTek and Ubuntu, that will ensure a smooth interface of hardware to OS. But this has significant implications. First of all, ARM devices use less power and are more efficient than their x86 equivalents. So we’re expecting a laptop substitute that will perform competitively even with comparably lower specs.

And in this case, there’s a modern iGPU and NPU to accelerate modern app uses. As a laptop substitute, this will function just like any regular Linux computer. You should be able to run apps like LibreOffice or use GIMP for photo editing and so on. And with the expansive ports provided, it should have very flexible applications. The pricing. I’m going to show you the projected pricing. The base pricing is $5.99 for the base model and $7.99 for the pro model. This can all change, but this is the current plan. During the pre-order period, you will be able to get a significant discount on this product.

Early birds can get up to 30% discount at $3.99, but for limited slots. And the price will be higher than that for the majority. But even the regular price is ultra reasonable compared to a Starlight Linux tablet from Starlight Systems at $7.58. This is extremely competitively priced. We expect that there will be a bunch of accessories made available for this like folios, keyboards, stylus, and so on. So basically a laptop capable device at a non-laptop price. This is the current plan. We expect that this will go on pre-order on Indiegogo in February. Then we project release by August, so late summer, 2026.

We are aware of all the delays that occurred in the Brax 3 release. And hopefully with the team having more experience, some of those kinks will have been worked out. If you want more information on this, you can discuss the product on the community chat on Brax May. There’s also a form for this on Braxtech.net. It’s this for you. So now I’ve explained the details. The question is, who is this product for? I have so many ideas, including those searching for a privacy-based larger device to use instead of a computer. To those wanting Linux but wanted pre-installed.

To media consumers that want a larger screen. To developers and hobbyists and home automation geeks. It’s a unique device for multiple purposes. So have you figured out how you might use this device? See you next time. [tr:trw].

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