Cosmo Communicator review
In a world of portable communications devices that fit a myriad of different purposes, it’s hard to imagine where the Cosmo Communicator finds its niche. It’s being billed by its creators, Planet Computers, as the “ultimate mobile device that fits in your pocket” and it straddles the line between a smartphone and laptop: it certainly has more features than its smartphone contemporaries and pound-for-pound (or should we say, gram-for-gram) we’d say it’s a better option than the average laptop for commuters, too.
Bulky, but the Cosmo Communicator is still pocket-sized
Planet Computers has packed enough features into the Cosmo Communicator to make it a kind of Swiss Army knife of portables. It’s a dual-SIM, 4G clamshell smartphone with dual-touchscreens: a 6” FHD+ internal display and a 2” AMOLED external display that notifies you about pretty much anything you need to make a decision on whether to open it or not. You can even reply to notifications by touching the external screen, though it’s easy to accidentally touch the display in your pocket – especially if you’re a bit of klutz like yours truly.
The Cosmo Communicator has a decent 24 megapixel external camera with a limited set of features, and takes reasonable photos and videos by the standard of today’s smartphone cameras. Its 6 gigabytes of RAM and MediaTek P70 chipset won’t be any threat to the likes of Samsung’s S21 or any of the big boys on the marketplace, but it ensures smooth running on all but the most taxing of applications and games. It has a whopping 4,220mAh battery, though for a phone that’s designed for continuous usage, that translates to just a couple of long train journeys before it’s completely drained. But the battery can be easily replaced by Planet Computers for a modest fee at the end of its life.
The external touchscreen can be used to make calls
It does compete in the bigger leagues in two key areas, however: storage and ports. With 128 Gigabytes of integrated flash memory backed up by a microSD slot, it should fulfil the storage demands of the keenest office worker. And it has a smorgasbord of ports including two USB-C slots, HDMI output and a 3.5mm audio jack.
Of course, these features are all nice-to-haves next to the Cosmo Communicator’s main event: a full mechanical keyboard, backlit with individually illuminated keys that have brightness adjustment. It’s solidly built, with practically no flex and the satisfyingly tactile feedback that you’d expect from a full-blown PC peripheral, not from a compact keyboard that measures less than 6” long.
If you have to ask ‘why?’, then the Cosmo Communicator probably isn’t for you. It’s a bit of a lump, weighing in at 326 grams and 1.73 centimetres thick when the clamshell is closed, but that’s still a lot less than both a smartphone and a laptop. There’s a reason this device was backed to the tune of over £1.5 Million in its crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo: a select number of people, we’d imagine them to be commuters who want to email and write documents on the go, need a smartphone with a PC-quality keyboard and not the restrictive digital keyboard popup that’s standard on every mobile. But maybe you’re just in the market for both a new mobile and a laptop, in which case, the Cosmo Communicator offers a lot of bang per buck, especially if you can take advantage of the current 30% discount offer.
