Gadgetory

now normally we won't cover every pie in the sky ambitious IndieGoGo project because we never know when something might take forever to ship or even turn out to be an outright scam and make us look bad because people think that we were promoting it so if just anyone had reached out and said hey hey Linus come on over here we're making the world's smallest Ultrabook go check out our IndieGoGo page we'd probably have close to the email and continue doing the very very important things that we do around here but it wasn't just anyone it was GPD technology who has a very respectable pedigree when it comes to designing and building super compact windows and gaming devices so then this is it the p2 max it's the world's smallest Ultrabook and it is shockingly usable you know what else is shocking the smoothness of that Segway to our sponsor a private Internet access P ia features fast multi gigabit VPN tunnel gateways worldwide so if you're looking for a VPN you can learn more about P ia at the link in the video description so on paper the p2 max is the closest thing to a bonafide laptop in GP DS lineup yet it's got an 8.9 inch screen so that's about the size of the smallest Acer Aspire One netbook from back in the day but at a much higher resolution it's got touchscreen support and even stylus input support it's only 650 grams so that's a little under one and a half pounds for our American friends and it sports up to 16 gigs of lpddr3 memory this is pretty cool it's got a fingerprint sensor for Windows hello so you just go ahead and boots up just like that and the IO is competitive with even some full-sized laptops that I've seen so you've got a full size USB type-a on the left along with a three-and-a-half millimeter jack then over on the right you've got a micro HDMI now I'm not a huge fan of this connector because it is quite fragile but the saving grace here is that you've also got a full size USB type A so that's two of those as well as a USB type-c and USB type-c makes so much sense for a device like this because with one dongle and this is one that I carry around all the time I can go here we go power in Gigabit Ethernet three more USB type days a full size HDMI and of course an SD and a microSD slot pretty darn portable so I want to do a full shutdown here so we can have a look at what the boot time is like from cold a sec pretty quick shut down dang wow that was a cold boot not too bad now with that said the fan does ramp up pretty loud on first boot it does settle in once your background processes finish launching and all that but it's definitely audible now after first boot and spending some time just you know navigating the OS you know launching browser logging into my email all that kind of stuff there were a few observations that I made about usability first and foremost being that the trackpad is in my opinion the weakest point of the device and that really surprised me not because it looked really amazing or anything but because usually these subcompact devices have their keyboards as their biggest flaw now for the trackpad the size here it is usable like you can see I can get most of the way across the screen at a pretty natural speed but it still felt like a big compromise and the movement rejection while clicking made the cursor move around a little bit more than I'd like causing me to miss on my double-click sometimes so it just wasn't that smooth to use by contrast however the keyboard which I expected to be the sole reason that I wouldn't find a device like this usable if it ended up being really well-balanced like here's a thing compared to here here we go compared to their pocket - they only had an extra about I don't know what would you say that's about an inch and change to work with but I guess this is still more evidence that every inch can make a big difference to the experience so what we lose on the p2 max is a dedicated Delete key but I'm ok with that because function delete is pretty good but what we gain is much better spaced arrow keys a much more favorable layout in terms of hitting things like period and comma down here we get better spacing between the keys this feels a lot more cramped than this one does it makes a shockingly big difference and this feeling of being less cramped is especially evident right here along the left side of the keyboard where escape tab caps lock shift and control are all in reasonably natural positions now that's not to say that it doesn't take some getting used to the idiosyncrasies of this layout for example instead of your semicolon and apostrophe your right pinky is now enter although at least period and comma are reasonably easy to reach down here as our forward slash and your apostrophe right here and then the other really big one is the fact that there's only a single control and a single alt so if you wanted to perform something like alt f4 you've got to kind of do that and then oh right only a single shift that one does still bother me but I also understand why they went this way and I don't see how I could have done it any better now moving on to the display it's a sixteen by ten display which some of you probably already noticed because it is a big deal and it makes the screen feel much bigger than it is both because you get that extra vertical space which amounts to less scrolling through content when you're reading and because it actually is physically larger than an equal sized sixteen by nine screen about two and a half percent bigger now how happy you're going to be with the CPU performance of a machine like this is going to depend heavily on your expectations it's still only two hyper threaded cores so I mean I was sitting at around 65 to 70 per göth Chrome it was interrupting full-screen video to prompt me to set it to default Wow like I'm already using you so I was sitting at around 65 to 70 percent CPU usage while I was installing premiere and launching steam for the first time and I actually spiked to a hundred percent while installing cross-code with the fan clearly audible above the HVAC in my office but at least that fan noise does come with a benefit the m3 80 100 why in this thing managed to turbo up to 2.6 2.7 gigahertz under full all core loads and I even saw a spikes as high as 3 gigahertz while performing moderately strenuous tasks and that's that's really impressive when you consider the 1.1 gigahertz base clock of the CPU and this thing so in the real world then this aggressive turbo behavior along with its support for hyper threading and the very pleasant surprise of a full pci express gen3 x4 link to the p2 maxes nvme SSD boot drive translated into not I fast but a very responsive experience like it's really not bad you know let's here let's go ahead and launch a game or something like here's a game that I've never launched on this thing just installed it for lulz like that's it's portal it's not heavy but that's a quick game launch so it's that responsiveness that I think gives GPD some credibility when they say that this is an ultrabook as opposed to a netbook because light productivity uses like Photoshop are absolutely possible and in an emergency even light video editing was possible to be clear I'm not endorsing switching to any dual core ultrabook as your premier Pro workstation but here's a little project that I did is a floatplane exclusive behind the scenes it's just shot on my phone 1080p so it's not heavy footage but the thing is in spite of the 100% usage for both the CPU and GPU it's actually prising lee responsive to work on now coming back to some more likely use cases for a machine like this it's AC Wi-Fi speeds were really good I managed 300 mega bit both up and down on our high-speed connection here in our office so that resulted in fast downloads responsive web browsing and fast cloud synchronization and it was also actually a really good experience for steam in-home streaming or I think they call it remote play now so with that I can actually play desktop games off of machines elsewhere in the office here so here you go let's go ahead and fire up some rocket leagues shall we so this makes for a really impressive experience because it's running at native resolution 2560 by 1600 60 frames per second and thing is that normally you would get some compression artifacts when you are streaming over the network instead of running you know natively on the PCs display except that because this display is so small it actually ends up looking shockingly clean oops oh yeah like it looks so sharp and watching 4k YouTube videos was honestly equally impressive so here's one of our videos running at 4k 30fps I'm gonna go ahead and alt-tab out of this and you can see our onboard Intel UHD 615 graphics are running at about 25% and our CPU is sitting in the you know 20 to 25% range and even more impressively is not even at base clock so it's actually in a power saving state right now while smoothly playing back 4k video and you know I think really watching 4k YouTube is one of the best use cases for this device the screen is super sharp thanks to its 2560 by 1600 resolution it's bright it's tuned fairly neutrally so you won't end up with that Best Buy showroom experience out of the box and the size of it allows it to sit nicely in between the inn convenience of pulling a full-size laptop out of your bag and the tiny whiny ice tray no vision of watching content on your phone see look at that looks like right in between alright let's go ahead and crack this thing open really the most impressive thing about this thing was that it never really felt slow like it didn't feel fast all the time but I never was like sitting there going wow I'm really just waiting around for this thing so let's have a let's have a look at the internals here so there's our processor dual core hyper threaded as I mentioned before Intel Wi-Fi chip right there here's our RAM so it looks like they've soldered that on to the board rather than using a sodimm and I guess they've got a good reason for it because when I checked inside hardware info I actually found that the RAM is running in dual channel mode at least on the 16 gig version so that's really nice because there will be a performance benefit there the battery is a 35 watt hour affair that actually takes up a very significant portion of the internals of the device here so you can see it's the full thickness of the thing and actually the only thing over here on this side of it seems to be the small dotter board for i/o and then finally we've got a pretty good look at the cooling system here so that's our regrettably pretty whiny little fan and then we've got a single heat pipe running from the CPU which of course has the graphics built into it over to a small heat exchanger that exhausts here at the back of the unit overall there's not much for me to complain about build quality wise they are using a single unibody piece of aluminum so you can actually see even with the bottom cover off there's not a ton of flex here and unlike their previous devices I was actually very pleasantly surprised by the quality of the speakers in the p2 max they're not amazing but they are definitely usable and at least their stereo and obviously the Flex is even better once you actually put the bottom on the thing so the conclusion here is I think it's obvious that I have a bit of a soft spot for a DPD I mean to be clear they've never responds or anything like that and I've never even met anyone there face to face I guess I just can't excuse some of the compromises that they make in their designs because I respect someone who's willing to do things differently instead of just making the same bloody thing as everyone else over and over and over again like it's it's kind of like what I said about the original LG Graham like yeah it had some build quality issues and honestly so does the P to max there's more rattle in the trackpad than I'd like though they may fix that for mass production but LG had a goal make the lightest device and damn it they accomplished that so same thing here yeah you're gonna have to change some of your typing habits but assuming that you've got pretty good eyes and you can handle the smaller screen you will be carrying around a shockingly functional and convenient device that weighs just one and a half pounds and this absolutely blew my mind even though like it shouldn't like it it makes sense it charges off of a 30 watt quick charge phone adapter that's pretty freaking cool so even though the P 2 max isn't the smallest device out of GPD I think it is their best and their most usable one to date and at around seven hundred US dollars in the IndieGoGo campaign I think it's priced not low but definitely reasonably audible has an amazing collection of audiobooks and there are a ton of reasons why you should give audible a chance they cover categories from arts to travel so whether you want to learn a thing or two or just listen to a great story while you're relaxing audible has got you covered and they even have their audible originals collection that features exclusive audio titles created by celebrated storytellers from worlds as diverse as theater journalism literature and more so visit audible.com slash Linus or Tex Linus to five hundred five hundred to join up now and if you sign up be sure to check out replay the history of video games it tells the story of how video games started in research labs in the 1940s then made their way to the modern day through extensive research and over 140 interviews the coolest thing is that Amazon Prime members can now get audible for just four ninety-five a month for the first three months that's basically like getting three months for the price of one after that it's 14.95 a month this offer ends on July 31st 2019 so go fast it's audible.com slash Linus or just text Linus - 500 500 so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that 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