Planet Computers' latest QWERTY palmtop/communicator was shown to the world's press at CES 2022 in Las Vegas - and now we have real world hands-on video of the device. Promising a Psion-quality mechanical keyboard plus traditional smartphone specs and behaviour, this should be something special. Here's the first hands-on of something that's not a prototype, at any rate...

The Astro Slide follows in the series of QWERTY smartphones from Planet, starting with the Gemini (which I still have), then the Cosmo Communicator. Rather than being clamshell here though, the idea is that the screen literally slides over the top of the keyboard and then angles up, reminiscent of a Nokia N97 or E7 from back in the day, or - more precisely - the HTC 7 Pro, from the Windows Phone era, and then, to an extent, the f(x)tec Pro1. 

I covered its launch here (a whopping two years ago) and advice from Planet Computers is that production units are arriving with the first backers imminently, the Astro Slides at CES being the first off the production line. 

So it has been interesting to see the video coverage online of people getting hands-on with the Astro Slide. So far it's smaller channels, but then the Planet Computers booth wasn't that high profile. I'll add more videos if I spot them.