GPD Pocket Review - They Don't Come Smaller Than This!

so laptops don't really come any smaller than this here this is a 7-inch Windows
10 laptop with a quad-core CPU the Atom x7 8750 it has 8 gigabytes of RAM 128
gigabytes of e MMC 4.5 storage wireless AC a 1080p screen that is fully
laminated it's only 7 inches and puts out a hundred and fifty lumens of
maximum brightness so it's called the pocket and does that mean it's
pocketable yes it does it folds down to just 18 19 millimeters and weighs just
504 grams so it's super portable and very easy to carry around with you to
put in a handbag or in large pockets if you do happen to have them so the pocket
screen does support five touch points and I've noticed that if you do have the
screen up right that when you do tap on it it will rock around a little bit
because of the seat placement however you put the screen back further it will
then touch the bottom of the table and you don't have that issue the screen
will also recline not completely flat but almost better than most laptops so
on the bottom we have these four sturdy rubber feet and what looks like a
speaker is in fact the intake vent here for the CPU cooler and on the right is
where you will find the exit vent so if you put your finger up here you can feel
warm air coming out here now we don't have a lot of ports on here but it's not
bad when you think about this device it's only a seven inch screen yet it's
got a full size USB 3 port that will power external hard drives we have a
micro HDMI port 3.5 millimeter out and my favorite is the type C port on here
it does support data charging and video out simultaneously so you can use type C
docks like this one here that I have allowing you to really connect up an
external monitor and keyboard or just one plug which is really good now the
hinge on the device is really sturdy it's very good well-made the whole build
quality overall is excellent but they are missing one thing
one crucial thing I feel in the design here which is a front-facing webcam
which I feel they should have put on one of these side bezels here they've got
space for it but I guess they had to make some compromises with the design
with the limitations they have limitations of course pull through into
the keyboard space the amount available space they have on here cannot fit a
full sized keyboard that is understandable they're only working with
7 inches so they've made a lot of compromises here in the design so typing
on this keyboard the key quality themselves and travel is very good I
have no issues with that but some things does take a lot to get used to and then
it's the space key the way it's separated I've found that typing on it a
lot when I go to type for example a I end up hitting s because the caps lock
is really the whole size including the a of a standard caps lock but they've cut
it down to only a quarter sized one here and the same goes for other keys you can
see along here with your punctuation and things so very compromised keyboard and
it can be to say the least frustrating at times using this keyboard I myself
personally don't really want to write more than a few lines of a web address
on this keyboard and the power button is set aside and it's away from the Delete
key and the backspace key which is good and has a firmer touch to it so the
resistance of the button is higher than the others and it's not so easy to press
now you will see two status LEDs in here one will light up red when you're
charging the one on the right will flash white when it is in sleep mode we've
also got some function keys here along the top and there is a Print Screen
button which is great to see on such a small device media controls and then
even a screen brightness shortcut via the function key now there's one thing I
don't like about the keyboard apart from a being cramped and the layout is the
keys of used to have like a matte texture to them so they show your suite
from your hands oils very easily and I feel that in the long run these buttons
are going to wear and get a little bit dirty the keys on the keyboard now we
have a track point down here because of course we don't
have space for a full touchpad now this is great because I do use the
touchscreen often but for the finer controls with a little bit of practice
you can do some very fine movements with a touch point here and if you are coming
from say an IBM sync pad from way back or than de novo thinkpads then you'll be
familiar with this it's basically the same controlled by pressure and it does
the job quite well for those smaller little
detailed things now the mouse buttons on here they are separated so we still have
the right and left and a little bit awkward to use at the same time but with
a bit of practice again you do kind of get used to it so the screen can be a
little bit frustrating at times because everything is so small now you can
increase the window scaling but I'm going with what they have set by default
which is 100% so to minimize and maximize things sometimes it takes about
two or three attempts but you can't used to it after a little while that
sometimes it's just not going to work so if you're someone that must have your
touches register and be super accurate every time this screen will frustrate
you but the screen itself is very nice so seven inches it's an IPS it has good
colors deep blacks and the viewing angles are perfect on here because it is
fully laminated now one thing to note too that the screen does not have an
accelerometer in the hardware so if you flip it up the screen will not rotate
automatically that is not going to happen there now the maximum brightness
is 300 sorry 250 lumens of brightness which you may think not enough but it is
sufficient and I find that it does the job quite well but of course outdoor use
it reflects a lot so it's not really the greatest for that because the
reflections will end up annoying you too so the pocket has some speakers that are
located just down here let's have a listen to them
so for the size of the device I feel this because aren't actually too bad now
they're not high quality ones I also wanted to comment too on the 3.5
millimeter headphone jack now notice that it was a little bit of static
coming through that I think that's something to do with the atom chipset
because with the Apollo Lake so I'm not really getting that so it sort of
disappointing to see and also there is a bit of a buzzing static through their
microphone when you record sound now the microphone there's a logo here is
located somewhere I feel around this area so if you happen to be using the
microphone and want to use the keyboard at the same time you're going to pick up
of course the feedback from the keys so the pocket is running Windows 10 home
and it activates you've actually put the CD key inside the box so if you want to
do a fresh install you've got it right there nice and handy so you see there
that's got 8 gigabytes of RAM now this Ram is not running at the fastest
supported speed for the Assam x7z 8750 which is 1600 megahertz the RAM only
runs at 1066 so they've clocked it down so a little bit slower but it is at
least running into your channel now another thing to point out too is free
space on the emmc we get 103 gigabytes which isn't too bad but there in mind
there is no microSD card slot on here so you can't expand the storage at all and
there is no SSD slot so here is the Geekbench fourscore now it's a little
bit slow of course than the Apollo Lakes which are faster now they're polar late
in 3450 which are being reviewing a lot of lately we'll get a score here of
about 1400 for the single core score and then the multi-core score on the Apollo
Lake will be about 4000 so it's about 600 points slower there but there's one
key difference the main difference is the GPU is quite a bit weaker on this
model and it will not natively decode vp9 or a TVC codecs which the Apollo
Lakes will so it's a bit of a difference there now you notice that if you've got
a keen eye that my wireless range here you've only got one or two bars so this
is the real weakness and the biggest con of this device is the wireless oh it
comes with Broadcom wireless AC and if I sit on top of my wireless router
how many I'm joking here but I mean very close to it I can get these speeds which
are brilliant there's a good speed very very good but I walk over to the next
room and the performance just plummets it goes down quite a bit and it happens
to be probably the weakest device I have tested when it comes to wireless range
in performance even weaker then for example those cheap mobile phones that I
often review it's really disappointing now I think a lot of its to do with the
design and the antenna I believe is just in this space right down here the
plastic here and because of the all-metal build I do think it is
blocking the performance of those antennas so it's very well looking at
the benchmarks but overall performance is good at light tasks about things like
Chrome just don't run as good on the atoms as they do on the Apollo Lakes so
once you start to get a few tabs open in there you can see with my website here
tick tablets that it does have a bit of chop enos to it the scrolling isn't as
smooth as I would like but edge of course that's different and you find
that the scrolling of that is quite a bit better so I normally just stick to
edge on on the atoms because really chrome performance isn't that great now
you can play videos and things like that you can stream in 4k you can do minor
Photoshop edits but very light once all that stuff is possible on an atom as
long as you've got a bit of patience here the antutu school which surprised
me I didn't expect it to perform this well but the CPU scores a bit high in
here so it got 110 thousand now the Apollo Lake n 3450 will more or less get
about 120 1000 so it's not far away but the 3d score is lower here than those
are polar lakes now battery life you can expect this is my little tester they did
around 7 hours of internet use this is using edge and chrome at 25 percent
brightness which is still reasonably right to use indoors we have lights on
everything I didn't have an issue there now it is very slow to charge even
though the charges 12 volts to I found out that it's only charging at 5
volts and as a result it will take just under five hours to fully charge when on
and if you turn it off it would take around 4 hours and 20 something minutes
to fully charge so quite slow there to charge the 7000 M hour battery and here
is the internal Toshiba emmc so it's four point five point one spec and these
speed for that speak of MMC aren't actually too bad good for K's on there
and very decent sequential writes and read so not too bad it would have been
better to have a MMC 5 spec or an SSD of course but I guess they'll be reserving
that for future models if they ever do release them alright so what about fan
noise because it is actively cooled not passively like the atom's normally are
so there's three settings it has so the first one is no fan so no noise the
second is a very low slow fan speed that you can't even really hear it on I had
to put my ear right up to it and then the final one is when you're gaming you
can just hear this well it's audible it's not loud or anything like that it's
quite a decent fan noise it doesn't make a high-pitched whine it doesn't really
bother me that much but yes you can hear it in a very quiet room when it's
running at 100% so Windows still games like Ashfield extreme here they run
perfectly fine as long as you lower the ceiling so what I've done is put the
visual settings down to the fastest performance sitting on optimal it was
very choppy and laggy but once I drop the settings down you can see you're
getting playable framerate legal urgency now you can see is just playable if you
could even call it playable at 720p on the lower settings 20 frames per second
so running very slow and really not that great so the performance is quite a step
behind the Apolo lakes which would be probably getting around 50 40 frames per
second in 1080p and now look at Counter Strike global Offensive now this is 800
x 600 to map lowest visual settings it is
running very slow 20 frames per second
making it very hard to get a kill but even with my skills I probably could in
any way get one so that is it for gaming let's have a look now at the
temperatures I'm just going to go over into Windows keep that running in the
background so we can have a look now at what the thermals got up to with this
gaming and I've been doing so here we go up to 73 degrees there you can see
hopefully just it's quite small the text naturally because it's a small screen
but let's have a look now at these surface temperatures so with my thermal
probe check now the surface temps it does feel like it's getting
quite hot to the touch so we're seeing around 37 degrees that's just around
this area right here let's have a look now at the underside of it just around
where the fan is that's where the CPU is that is getting reasonably warm now 39
degrees so it does get quite hot to the touch
once you're pushing it hard and even when charging it - it gets hot so to
recap here the build quality is excellent it's very well made it's put
together great there's no problems with the fit and finish I can find no flaws
with it whatsoever it just feels premium and it should for
the price tag which is one of the cons there this is a very expensive little
laptop here we're talking around 500 us for a last gen chipset power device to
me that's way too pricey and they really need to focus on lowering that price so
it's got a decent 1080p display it's sharp it's bright it's got good colors
but it's a little hard to use the touch because of Windows and the screen being
so small you'll often find miss touches same go for the keyboard it can be at
times very frustrating to type on especially with the caps lock and the
spacebar I found to be the biggest hurdles there and often just resulting
in that I don't want to type on this
keyboard I'd rather plug in an external keyboard and it is great that we have a
type C port so we can output to our USB keyboards our monitors and drive all
that but bear in mind though that the monitor maximum resolution you get out
of that type C port is 1080p that's a restriction from the CPU so the Apollo X
can go right up to 4k but it's only thirty Hertz but at least we've got more
range there if you wanted to run for example 60 Hertz 1440p that is possible
but not on this here so the trackpad is quite accurate and once you get the hang
of it it's a lot more better to use actually than the touch because touch I
find I use that for basic web scrolling and other things but we need more
accurate finer movements that's where the trackpad comes in the touch touch
point is sorry I'm not used to them so really who is this device for that's
what I'm struggling to fathom that why this device really exists in 2017 it is
great to have a pocketable Windows 10 laptop then I will not deny it it's
great but you know is it really practical I think not the keyboard is
frustrating to use it's just too small maybe a GPD came back with something
like a 10-inch version of this or a 9 or 8 inch version well they could fit a
little bit more space in there and perhaps put a small touchpad if they
could that would probably be a little bit better so they're a couple of real
deal breakers on here for me the first one is the wireless reception the range
of it is super poor it's not good at all I mean I can walk to the other side of
the studio here and the signal strength is just right down on the bottom where
it is at the moment where other laptops will have full signal strength at the
moment so really you have to almost sit on top of your wireless router to get
the coverage there it does get a little too hot once you really push it hard and
if you charge at the same time and charging times it is slow to charge
taking around five hours and then of course the keyboard and all those other
extras I just mentioned so have a real long think about do you really need this
device it's one of those I feel gimmicky kind of
Isis that really serve no true purpose in 2017
although someone's going to jump onto their comments and say I disagree with
you Chris I love the device I'm using it all the
time I write full whole novels on that keyboard you know you're always going to
have someone out there but it seems anyway the crowdfunding there was a lot
of demand for this so there is the market for this but it's a niche product
and really I don't think I will be hanging onto this one for long. Thank you
so much for watching this review and if you want to see the internals of this
device here make sure you check out the unboxing and I do have to catch you back
in the channel soon bye for now

GPD Pocket Review - They Don't Come Smaller Than This!

Latest Posts