I just recently got my flipper - was buying some long range nfc stuff, and noticed they had that in stock, so decided it is cheap enough to just get it and figure out later what it is about.

I'm very pleasantly surprised - sturdy hardware, well polished software, and very good documentation. It is just a great thing to always have in your pocket - digital companion to the swiss army knife I always carry.

I have a lot of more powerful specialized equipment - which pretty much everything in the article is. But most of that isn't really suitable enough to always have it with me - not versatile enough, or limited options without attached computer. flipper is great to just have a look around - and to know what to bring next time, if there's something interesting to investigate further.

edit after having it a bit longer: The versatility of the flipper is still unique, and makes it a pocket knife you just want to carry - but it shows problems on specialist use, probably mainly because it still is a relatively new device. If there's a chance I want to interact with HF NFC I went back to carrying my proxmark (rdv4 with bluetooth addon, small HF only antenna) as well - can read/dump more card types, and has less bugs for card emulation. I still use the flipper to get a first impression, though - it just has the better standalone UI.

A big problem of the proxmark is the need to recompile the firmware for different standalone modes - to make that less painful on the road I've now added packages of git head for Tumbleweed on OBS which contain all possible standalone firmwares for PM3 generic and RDv4 with and without bluetooth.