The GPD Pocket is a wee laptop with a 7″ high-dpi touchscreen display and an enticing $399 price tag. It’ll be light on power, with an Intel Atom CPU, 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD, but promises about 12 hours on a charge and two USB ports, one of them type C.
There’s a ThinkBook-style tracknipple in lieu of a trackpad. It’ll run Ubuntu or Windows 10 and, somehow, they managed to sneak a headphone jack on there.
Pounce now if you’re interested: the cheap tag is an early-bird special for crowdfunding backers. It’ll be $599 after the Indiegogo run ends.
The first thing I reviewed when working for Wired, as I remember, was Fujitsu’s U810, a similarly tiny laptop. It was cool, but you couldn’t easily work on it, and the specs of 2006 meant a little power and a big battery. It—and various other “UMPC” devices—attacked a portability problem that has never really been solved: desktop apps in your pocket. Netbooks, tablets and powerful smartphones each address adjacent problems, and are so good at solving them now that the idea of a pocket laptop seems almost a joke. But “desktop apps and a decent keyboard in your pocket” still does it for me!
The best “actually a pocket laptop” available right now would be, I guess, a second-generation Sony Vaio P with an SSD from about 5 years ago. That design was built around a fairly standard key pitch, making typing easy, but pocketability is suspect. Whereas the GPD pocket is clearly condensing it way tighter.
It’s not GPD’s first rodeo. Last year, they raised $720k to create the world’s smallest gaming laptop, the GPD Win. Here it is, ugly as sin and fat on power:
[Thanks, Joel!]