Key Takeaways
- The Flipper One, announced with Kali Linux support and improved hardware, has mysteriously disappeared from Flipper’s website.
- Despite community manager confirmation of ongoing development, little information has been provided by the company about the Flipper One.
- Fans of the Flipper Zero eagerly await a potential successor with Kali Linux support, unlocking even more capabilities for this versatile hacking tool.
The Flipper Zero has been out for a few years now. It’s a fantastic first-generation product that plenty of people get a lot of use out of, but to many, it’s long overdue an upgrade. The company announced a Flipper One a few years ago, but that product has mysteriously disappeared off of its website, with Flipper being rather quiet about its whereabouts.
As far as an official statement goes, the most clear-cut explanation I have been able to find has been on the official Flipper Devices Discord. There, a bot will respond to Flipper One requests by saying “The Flipper One does not exist and previous information was based on an outdated concept.” I reached out to the company for comment and did not receive a response at the time of writing.
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Flipper Zero: What it is, how you can use it
The Flipper Zero is a swiss army knife of hacking tools, and it can do so much that you wouldn’t expect.
What was the Flipper One?
A concept device running Kali Linux
When the Flipper One was announced, it boasted a lot of features and improvements that the community loved. It was said to be based on an i.MX6 SoC, to have full Kali Linux support, and would have fully open-source hardware and software. The SoC is a 1GHz CPU and had support for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, making for a pretty big improvement over the Flipper Zero.
With an improved NFC module, it was said to be able to read/write all ISO-14443 cards, including Mifare, contactless PayPass/PayWave bank cards, Apple Pay/Google Pay, and more. It had an older LCD screen and used 400nA with the backlight off. Overall, it was a pretty major improvement over the current Flipper Zero, especially thanks to the Kali Linux support it had out of the box.
Since then, the Flipper One page has been removed entirely from Flipper’s website. There’s no mention of it, and any of the original mentions for it have been completely removed.
What happened to the Flipper One?
It’s disappeared entirely
The Flipper One has since disappeared, with a community manager for the company saying, a year ago, that it was “2-3 years at least” away. They also confirmed that it’s “still in development.” Finally, Pavel Zhovner of Flipper apparently confirmed that it was in active development in 2020 in an interview with Hackerso it’s very much still a product that seems to exist, even if the company has been completely silent for quite a while now.
“We are currently working on Flipper One, but we do not quite understand what it should be. In general, we want a fat combine with FPGA and SDR, in which all protocols can be determined programmatically, but so far there are doubts whether they will buy a device for $ 300-500. So the project is in active R&D, but there is no understanding of important parts yet. For example, they did not choose a Wi-Fi module, because all existing chips suitable for attacks are already outdated. You may have to sponsor the development of your driver. In general, we will see,” Zhovner allegedly said in that interview, according to Security Patrol.
As it stands, we’ll be watching and waiting for a successor to the much-loved Flipper Zero. It’s a fantastic device that you can pick up for less than $200, and the amount that it can do is incredible. If there ever is a successor that runs Kali Linux, it will open the door for it to be able to do even more than it already can. If it will resemble the original Flipper One is anyone’s guess.
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It can be used for nefarious purposes, but the Flipper Zero can host Evil Portals thanks to its WiFi Devboard module.