Remember netbooks? They were cute, they were convenient, and they were largely underpowered, with the latter being the reason for their eventual demise. Still, couldn’t there possibly be a market for a small laptop that you can, literally, put inside your purse? The guys behind the GPD Pocket obviously thinks there is.
A mini-laptop, the computer combines a seven-inch touchscreen display and a reasonably big keyboard with a full Windows 10 build, allowing you to use all your favorite PC applications without having to carry a full-sized laptop. While GPD claims it’s designed to fit in your pocket, we have no idea what pocket they’re talking about, since this is basically a 7-inch tablet that’s about twice as thick, so we recommend finding a small purse to carry it in instead.
The GPD Pocket is powered by a 1.6GHz quad-core Intel Atom x7-X8750, Intel HD graphics, and 8GB of RAM, so it should handle most productivity applications without any hitch, although resource-intensive gaming and media-editing might push it to its eventual choke points. It has 128GB of onboard flash storage, so you’ll definitely want to plug in an external hard drive for the rest of your files and apps, with the onboard 7000mAh battery providing it just five hours of video playback (up to 12 hours for light applications), so a large power bank may also be in the cards if you want to use this all day.
The IPS touchscreen display comes with full 1080p resolution, so it should work great for watching movies on the go, with a Gorilla Glass layer protecting the screen from the hazards of everyday use. It use a chiclet-style keyboard with decent-sized keys for typing comfort, although they had to take out the trackpad to give the keyboard all the space it needed. In its place, they threw in a small trackball instead, which you’ll likely find serviceable or just ignore entirely in favor of a separate mouse peripheral.
Despite the tiny size, the GPD Pocket comes with a complement of ports, including a USB Type-C, one USB 3.0, a mini-HDMI, a headphone jack, and even a microSD slot for added storage. Yep, it can accommodate more peripherals than some full-sized laptops out there. They also throw in integrated stereo speakers, although at this size, we don’t imagine them sounding any good. There’s no camera, by the way, so you’ll need to plug one in if you want to do video chats.
Since a device this small will have all its hardware tightly-packed, cooling is a very important aspect of the mini-laptop’s design. In this case, they’re using an active cooling method that relies on copper tubes to conduct heat and a built-in fan to dissipate it via vents along the side. Simply put, you never have to worry about overheating issues even if you use this as a main work laptop any time you’re on the road.
Originally an Indiegogo project, the GPD Pocket is now a full-fledged product. If you don’t mind shelling out $516 for an underpowered mini-laptop that runs Windows and Ubuntu like a boss, it’s available now.