A Few Weeks In My Pocket

 

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The GPD Pocket is a tiny, light, yet full-featured laptop. Online pictures don't do it justice, it has a ton of "Awwww!" factor when you see it in real life.

I purchased from Amazon for $600 on 2017-08-22 and it showed up on 2017-08-24.

It comes with the Windows 10 home, and there's a project and github repo to set up Ubuntu or other Linux distros on it. I have mine set up to dual-boot between Windows and Linux. The Ubuntu side has some issues but works well enough for me to type on. I've had no issues with the Windows side.

The main thing that I wanted was a laptop light enough for me to carry everywhere, that I could use to write on the bus or anywhere else. It works great for that use case. In addition, I've used it for:

The keyboard is a bit of a mixed bag. It's surprisingly good considering its size, and the key response is good. The special characters, though, are placed oddly. So straight text is fine, except for some punctuation, but coding isn't great.

It has four ports, USB, headphones, micro HDMI, and USB-C. It charges through USB-C, and the charger it came with died after about a month, while I was on vacation in Michigan. A local Best Buy, though, had a decent replacement for $25.

Another issue I had with it, after a few months, was that the screen started flickering and there was a thick white circle superimposed over the display. (Or jittering – it looked like interlaced displays used to look, on the Amiga. Flickervision.) I took the back off, removed and reseated the video cable, and it went back to normal.

It has a quad-core Intel Atom x7-Z8750 at 1.60GHz, 8 gigs of RAM, and a 128 gig SSD. Plenty of RAM, and plenty of disk space even though I'm dividing it in half for dual-boot. Compiling a kernel on it is slow, but it's spritely enough for everything else.

My final vote? I love it. There's nothing else that fits my set of requirements nearly as well. If it was destroyed, I'd order another immediately.

And that "Awwww!" factor? Twice, on the bus, people have asked me about it. That isn't normal Seattle bus behaviour…


All material Copyright © 2006–2019 Ulysses Somers, except where otherwise noted.