The company behind the GPD Win handheld gaming device have been making Android handhelds for years. But GPD’s Win got a lot of attention because it’s a Windows-powered handheld that can run PC games.
Now the company is planning to launch something new: a 7 inch laptop that’s small enough to slide into your pocket.
It’s called the GPD Pocket, and it’s expected to support either Windows 10 or Ubuntu 16.04 Linux.
GPD is just showing off a few rendered images and mockup prototypes at this point, so we’ll have to wait a while to see a final, working product. But the company expects the system’s features to include:
- 7 inch IPS touchscreen display with Gorilla Glass 3
- Intel Atom x7-Z8700 Cherry Trail processor
- 4GB of RAM
- 128GB of storage
- 7,000 mAh battery
The system is said to be slightly larger than the GPD Win, and it has an aluminum chassis. Pictures show a USB Type-C port, a full-sized USB port, an HDMI port, and a headset jack. And while the laptop is too small to fit a full-sized keyboard and touchpad, it does have a QWERTY keyboard and a ThinkPad-like pointing nub that you can use to move a mouse cursor on the screen, as well as left and right buttons for clicking.
The lack of palm rests could make typing kind of uncomfortable, but I doubt anyone would use this sort of device as their only PC anyway. Instead, it’s a sort of portable laptop that can handle light-weight PC gaming duties on the go, but which you could also use to tap out a quick email, do some web browsing, or other activities that might not require a big screen or a high-power processor.
GPD sent me a demo unit of the GPD Win handheld to review last year, and I was pretty impressed with its performance… while it worked. But after a brief period the keyboard stopped working and I sent my review unit back to GPD.
I know I haven’t been the only person to run into bugs with the GPD Win, so hopefully the company will take feedback from its first Windows handheld and apply it to the upcoming GPD Pocket to make a device that’s more reliable.
According to ton-chi-ki, GPD plans to launch an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign for the GPD Pocket in February.
There’s no word on the price or release date for the new model. But it looks like a promising device for folks lamenting the fact that major PC makers seem to have dropped out of the UMPC market in recent years.
thanks islisis!
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43 Comments on "GPD Pocket will be a 7 inch touchscreen laptop with Windows & Ubuntu support"
Resolution?
It’s 1920×1200
It has a pointing stick? I’m sold. I hope this turns out to be a nice device.
So how’s the GPD Win doing? There seemed to have been some issues with the initial release. Have they been resolved? Build quality and reliability would be my main concern with this new device.
If it’s compatible with ThinkPad Classic Dome caps, I’m sold too. That picture looks awfully like a Soft Dome.
I have one. It works fine, but the screen is unusably small. Requires a magnifying lens and great precision to click on icons, scrollbars and so on.
the product hasn’t even been released yet. let alone 4 months ago when your mouth opened and this crap fell out.
A lot of people (me included) have failing keyboards. Some people sent their unit for repairs in november and still got no reply from GPD let alone a replaced unit. They admittedly lost someones unit too because they didn’t go to pick it up from the post office for many weeks and now they can’t find it. I decided not to send them back mine (even thou the keyboard failed), because as far as I know nobody got their unit replaced ever since the Win become available in november. Instead of amateur-hour they have amateur-month at GPD.
I have a win it’s awesome and feels build like a tank! I have a very minor version of the crashing graphics driver issue but it really can’t hamper the fun in any way for mine.
I LOVE IT! age of empires 2 hd over lan for 3 hours? No problem!
I have aquanox 2, retro city rampage, quake 4, devil may cry 4 special edition, astebreed, vulkaiser, burnout paradise, sonic all stars racing transformed and some more on it and all run GREAT and play GREAT with the controls. And all of these fit on just internal storage!
I didn’t have any issues out of the box except for the device being slow to react to the face buttons of the controller section (50ms delay instead of 1-10ms). They fixed that with a firmware update. The keyboard is still horrible though and has no phone-like features to make thumb typing easier (e.g shift then key produces shifted key, I guess the term is shift latching). Don’t get me started about the heatsink design either, let’s just remove some fins from it, not like anyone will miss those. No you dingbats the fins are what gives a heatsink the surface area to work!
Looks like it would make a neat little Linux computer. Would be a neat thing to SSH with.
They updated the keyboard layout since yesterday, but the backspace is still at a horrible place. This is not much more as an AutoCAD file as of now, we’ll see if they make it how will it really look.
Backspace seemms to be a mior concert. You can remap the power key to be a backspace, but no amount of remapping will solve the missing tab issue or the trackpoint dislocation.
They update it at least twice a week. Today it looks like this:
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/…
There is still room for improvement, but not much, they are almost ready with the whole thing, they have working close-to-final prototypes too.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/…
Also, the power key and the Fn buttons are not remapable, because the Power button is on a different GPIO, and the Fn button is handled by the keyboard’s internal controller, so Fn + something will give you a scann-code to remap, but Fn alone isn’t.
The tab-worthy button is still missing. The whole layout is one button too short, can’t they make them smaller and bring the ;’ back?
And the trackpoint is still dislocated. Why, oh why?
> the Power button is on a different GPIO
Meh, not enough to stop me from remapping it.
> Fn + something will give you a scann-code to remap, but Fn alone isn’t.
Let’s hope for a Thinkpad-like switchability.
All in all, that’s a horrendous layout, way worse than whatever I’ve dealt with, and especially Vaio P.
Should had went to 8″. 8″ at 720p is pretty usable with Windows 10.
A new netbook! Too bad about the poor reviews. The Linux version would make me very happy.
GPD Pocket will provide Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and Windows 10 Home two version.You can select the one which you prefer.
I hope it has a fan like the GPD WIN, otherwise its going to overheat and throttle instantly.
Yes,GPD Pocket will have a fan for cooling.
The trackstick should be moved higher. One of the benefits of tracksticks on other notebooks is that the user doesn’t need to move their hands up and down when switching between typing and moving the mouse.
Too bad GPD’s execution and post-release support of the GPD Win was pretty bad. I doubt I’ll support their Indiegogo campaign. If the GPD Pocket turns out to be a great machine and GPD’s support improves, then I’d buy it after release.
Loved this instantly but the comments here are scaring me a bit.
Generally like the keyboard setup – I can get used to the backspace key / doesn’t interfere w/the del key. Do not like the mouse pointer location at all, it’s too “in your face”. I may be in the minority but I never liked the pointer (have one on my laptop, never use it). When not mobile/outdoors, I’ll probably use a full-sized mouse anyway (huge preference).
Also like the larger size of the [enter] key in comparison to the [shift] key below it.
If they can get another full-sized USB port on this thing (already thinking about external ‘this and that’) and resolve the keyboard issues (re: comments), running Ubuntu on this thing will be amazing. Envisioning so many ways I can use this.
Will be obsolete when Arm Win10 PC’s start to ship, someone can then do a UMPC that is actually useable thanks to the x86 emulation, keeping mind they usage cases for these devices will be work apps not games.
x86 is just not practical in these form factors while still being cool running and cheap all in one.
The smart thing to do would be to scrap this device, redesign around Arm Snapdragon while also helping port native Arm versions of popular emulators so if you want game emulation stuff you have it. Win32 native Arm is also possible alongside UWP Arm apps.
Yeah, but this thing will have better performance AND better battery life when compared to those ARM-Windows10 devices… at least when it comes to x86-executables.
And if you’re not there to use Windows10 for x86-exectuable programs, then why not just use Android instead??