Gadgetory

way back in 2008 it was my job at NCIX to hawk these things netbooks these were a big push from Intel and their partners with the idea being that they were tiny little laptops with really long battery life and enough performance for net-like tasks like web browsing one small problem ok let's do another take only one small problem they were mostly so bringing us into the current year it is 2017 and there is one company that believes they can bring the netbook back to its former glory GPD and this is the pocket which smashed its IndieGoGo crowdfunding goal raising over three million dollars but does the netbook really have a place in the modern day the be quiet pure bass 600 features a versatile design noise insulation and optimization for different liquid cooled radiator configurations learn more at the link below alright so rewinding everything you get in the box for your four hundred and fifty nine dollars if you buy it on IndieGoGo or 599 six hundred US dollars if you buy it retail is right here you get a USB type-c cable you get a wall wart with a Type C plug and you get the GPD pocket itself in many respects this is actually quite similar to their last crowdfunded device the GPD win which was more of like a more of like a kind of handheld keyboard e thing with game pads on it it was kind of like a gaming device this one though it has similar specs so it's got an atom x7z 8750 so that is the top-of-the-line ultra portable 2 watt cpu it's got 8 gigs of ram this time 128 gigs of emmc solid-state storage and it's got support for both Windows 10 and Ubuntu now don't expect the world's most amazing performance but it can run Cinebench and I mean lots of other day-to-day stuff I mean here let's fire up a Chrome browser that didn't feel too bad fire up Netflix I mean it's quad core processor 8 gigs of ram it's it's actually fairly usable and they've made a lot of other improvements since the spiritual predecessor as well notably in terms of build quality and display so that's what a netbook felt like these were like plastic cheap toys and this one does cost a fair bit more but and this doesn't seem to have been unintentional here you get like this unibody aluminum style construction with the with the screws closing it in on the bottom there and you get this really rigid feeling screen the thing feels really nice in the hand and for the display instead of a low resolution tn man if these come a long way you get a 1080p IPS 7-inch display so that's a pixel density it looks really good I turned it down to a hundred and fifty percent scaling because I found that was kind of my sweet spot but it is very very usable even at this size compared to how much stuff you could put on before seven thousand milliamp power battery meant that our PC mark battery life test came in at over five hours which is a really impressive result for running basically Full Tilt all the time meaning that this thing and last but not least with all those improvements plus the fact that they've made it truly pocket-sized is a really different kind of device but there's always a but isn't there there are some things that time couldn't change and that's the size of human hands the interface could be better so some people will be thrilled to see the nipple return from the IBM ThinkPads of your but this split left and right click and having them so close with this Ridge here makes for not the most ergonomic experience unless you are really good at you know this kind of this kind of work if you uh if you catch my drift there also the keyboard I don't know how anyone managed to make a keyboard worse than a netbook their previous device actually felt better because it was intended to be used with just your thumbs whereas this sits in that awkward middle ground where it's hard to use with thumbs but almost impossible to get your hands on they've made some very weird changes I didn't realize just how off it was until I tried to play a game and I put my fingers on WASD and figured out that W was way the crap over there like I have some suggestions get rid of caps lock why do we need a caps lock button move backspace up so that I don't keep hitting delete instead of backspace that's very unnatural : really needs to be here but then where do you put enter I mean in some ways I do have ideas but in other ways I just don't know how you can fix this and typing without a lot of specific training on this device is going to be a real challenge okay so next I want to take a look at gaming performance but while we wait for Windows Live or whatever to install we decided to open it up and have a look at the inside this thing is like 60% battery so here's our here's our Wi-Fi so there's our two antennas there's our two watt CPU here's our eight gigs of ram always love opening this stuff up oh and actually I guess now's a good time to check out i/o so we've got a full sized USB 3 SuperSpeed we've got a headphone jack I mean you can't take that for granted these days my friends we've got a micro HDMI I'm not a huge fan of this connector but it's better than mini at least in terms of fragility and more importantly this is really cool we've got a USB type C so that is used for charging but it can also be used for a dongle so something like this where you can adapt that single port to multiple USB HDMI gigabit networking I've actually done it and I've also tested this you can plug your dongle if you've got one of those ones that's made for the MacBook into the wall and the whole thing will charge it'll power the dongle your devices and the laptop if you have a powerful enough wall board which is pretty frickin sick so let's go ahead and fire up Batman Arkham Asylum shall we come on you rat bastard okay so obviously the point of this isn't that torchlight is the most difficult game in the world to run but rather that for basic games you actually can run them directly on the device itself you can see it medium to high settings we're actually getting about you know 15 to 25 FPS which is yeah playable but not really something that I would recommend what I'm more into for a device like this is thanks to its use of a decent AC Wi-Fi chips this is what I'm more interested in so I'm using steam in-home streaming on a gaming computer elsewhere in the office and getting an utterly seamless 1080p game streaming experience on this little portable device hit the buddy know I miss the buddy and actually the audio experience on the built-in speaker speakers they seem to be a little confused themselves about they call it a stereo speaker but last I checked you need to physical speakers for stereo audio some yeah it sounds like it's coming out of one part of the keyboard the point is it's actually reasonably loud and up to about 6065 percent volume it's pretty distortion free it's a very good experience which I guess leads us to content consumption and we're going from strength to strength here 1080p Netflix is looking really really sharp on this little tiny display and plays back with no dropped frames whatsoever and it's actually it's nice at the hinge folds back this far it's a little bit inconvenient that it's kind of hard to access the touch controls at the very bottom like the windows taskbar but in terms of like kind of sitting and watching a movie on it honestly it's a it's a pretty darn good experience and 1080p YouTube same thing so you're looking at about 50% CPU usage if you're watching like a reasonably fast-paced video at Full HD but for me a lot of those use cases are not that dissimilar from what you could do with you know a windows-based tablet so it becomes sort of a question of form factor and i/o this keyboard is going to require a lot of adjustment but the pocket ability kind of gave me a different idea for for how I see this as something where out of desperation you might actually use it like this when you're sitting on a plane or on a or on a train or something like that but normally it's more about like taking the vast majority of the local storage you actually need like 128 gigs 8 gigs around like it's a decent little machine and being able to really carry it around with you and plug it in with a single cable solution to a desktop type display now it's running older Intel HD graphics so it's like DisplayPort 1.1 so at native resolution on this ultra wide we're running it 30 Hertz or something like that and then using an HDMI adapter here I think we were only even able to get up to 1080p but it is still the ability to just take it plug it in and be using your computer wherever you go that is very appealing to me and enabled by USB type-c so I guess the real question that is is would you spend four hundred and fifty nine US dollars on indiegogo or $5.99 retail on it I guess it depends on the kind of consumer you are if you were waiting for a modern netbook I think they've done a fantastic job but if you think the netbook should have been buried put in the trash can you do it again oh there's no garbage can there this time well then you won't be that excited about it that was awkward want to build a website but you don't know the first thing about building websites well Squarespace has got you taken care of they've got a bunch of gorgeous templates you just pick the one you want and whether you're doing up something for the you know local knitting group or whether you're you know building something for the sports team that you help coach you can have a professional awesome looking website in a matter of minutes they've got 24/7 support via live chat and email in case you run into trouble all of the templates feature responsive design so it scales to look great on any device even a phone and they've got tons of great features built in every website comes with a free online store cover pages allow you to have a one-page online presence in minutes and you can now publish content in Apple news format directly from the Squarespace blog so head over to squarespace.com and start a trial today with no credit card required then use offer code ltte to get 10% off your first purchase so thanks for watching guys if you dislike this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit the like button yet subscribe maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description while you're down there you can check out our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which is totally awesome you should totally join it