More than two years after launching and then cancelling a dubious Kickstarter campaign for a dual-screen handheld computer designed for gaming, the folks at PGS still seem to be hoping to bring the gadget to market some day.
PGS has been posting occasional progress updates to the company blog for the past few years, and recently PGS posted a few pictures to Twitter showing what’s said to be a prototype.
This thing might actual be a real product… eventually.
There were a lot of reasons to be skeptical of PGS when the company first launched a crowdfunding campaign. The design and target price were both ambitious, the concept came from a company with no experience building such a device, and there was no working prototype.
Two years later, we still haven’t actually seen a working prototype in action. But the latest images show a custom computer board, a cooling system, a (rather small looking) battery, dual screens, and a hinge that allows the device to be used in single-screen or multi-screen modes.
The developers are also apparently considering a processor upgrade: the Intel Atom x7 chip that was initially promised is looking a little long in the tooth these days, so the team is “considering the possibility of using Core m3-8100Y” instead. That would certainly give the PGS handheld more power, but it would also probably drive up the price.
It’s unclear if other details have been changed — the prototype definitely looks a little chunkier than the original concept drawings, but there’s no word on whether the device will still ship with up to 8GB of RAM, up to 128GB of solid state storage, the ability to dual boot Windows and Android, and other features that had been promised in 2016.
Then again, it’s still unclear whether this thing will ever actually ship.
Update: PGS has updated its website with new technical specs for its handheld systems. Take these all with a grain of salt since all we’ve seen so far is a prototype, but here are the planned models:
- PGS Lite – 5.5 inch, 720p display, Atom x7-Z8750/4GB/64GB eMMC
- PGS Hardcore – 6 inch, 1080p display, Core m3-8100Y/8GB/128GB eMMC
- PGS Hardcore Titanium – 6 inch, 1080p display, Core m3-8100Y/16GB/256GB eMMC
The Lite model is said to feature a USB Type C port, a 4,080 mAh battery and just a single display, while the Hardcore models have the secondardy 3.3 inch IPS display, a “smart active cooling system,” Thunderbolt 3 ports, a 6,500 mAh battery, and a vibration motor.
I love how their blog claims that GPD stole their ideas, as if no one else could think of building a handheld gaming system and then updating it with a faster CPU… It was especially ironic since I was reading it on my GPD Win 2. PGS sounds like complete amateurs. Ideas are cheap, execution matters.
Also, I don’t really see the point of the second screen. I suppose it’ll make for the best Gameboy DS emulator around… but I don’t know of many PC or Android games that would put a second screen to good use.
Good luck to them though, I hope they actually manage to ship something. I’d love to see GPD have some real competition 🙂
Honestly it’d be a great utility – win10 has an on-screen keyboard that could use the lower screen (if it’s touch) and using that as a touchpad for fullscreen games (would need extra software, but I know some that could probably) would allow one to more effectively play games that might be difficult to play with a gamepad alone.
Light MMOs could be playable.
Assuming this is real, the battery seems small/low capacity for such a device and the 2 small fans are probably really loud. Not holding my breath but I hope this is real and PGS executes well.
In the meantime, I’ll be using a Surface Go with LTE which I believe is the smallest Windows device you can get with LTE at the moment.
This is gonna be the SmatchZ story all over again?
I genuinely thought the people who tried to build the PGS Pocket that they gave up after the skeptic/backlash, and that they were the same group to kickstart the Smach Z.
So are they the same, or not?
No
I believe the PGS story has been going longer than Smach Z