Review on 💻 GPD Pocket 2 Mini Laptop - 7" Touch Screen, Aluminum Shell, UMPC, Windows 10 System, Intel m3-8100Y CPU, 8GB/256GB, Amber Black by Kevin Shimmens

My unit came unconfigured to Windows 10 for this market, so when I opened the laptop the screen was rotated 90 degrees (normal before drivers were installed) and with OS language set to Chinese. I had to reinstall the new version from a USB drive to set English as the install language and installing the display drivers fixed the rotation issue. Please note that most GPD drivers are hosted on Google Drive (!) and sometimes links are unavailable because too many people have downloaded the files. So I downloaded them in advance and kept backups somewhere safe. A laptop is an unusual device - it really fits in your pocket. However, it's heavier than it looks, so it won't disappear when you put it in your pocket. Build quality appears to be quite good - a metal body, clicky keys with decent travel, an LCD display with no dead pixels, and uneven backlighting. A little strange onboard"mouse". An optical mouse is like a smooth trackpoint that doesn't move but registers your finger movements. I found it pretty accurate for basic point and click. You can click it to register a left mouse click, but it doesn't seem to support click-and-drag or drag-and-drop locking, which limits its usefulness. The good news is that there are two membrane keys on the other side of the device that can be used for left and right clicks. Since the left/right buttons are flat membrane keys, I couldn't capture them by touch - I wanted to use the laptop with two hands like a game controller to control the mouse and mouse buttons simultaneously. The keyboard is very small. I was kind of able to type on it blindly after a few days of practice, but I still made mistakes and I would never call the typing experience pleasant. After typing on the Pocket for about a day, it threw away my muscle memory for full-size keyboards. Every time I switched between Pocket and MacBook, I had to relearn. Which brings me to a common problem with laptops - everything is so small that you end up wanting to plug in something else to compensate. An optical mouse setup is fine and makes sense given the size of the device, but you can just plug in an external mouse and not have to deal with any weirdness. Using an external keyboard can help you avoid hand cramps and typos. The screen is nice, but because it's so small, you can plug in an external display and not have to constantly squint or settle for just one magnified app at a time. At this point, you might as well buy a slightly larger laptop. Overall I'd say this is a really cool new device, but to me its coolness doesn't justify the price, the questionable support options, or the difficulty of using it. I think I'd comfortably pay about a third of the current asking price to have a tiny laptop that just isn't very useful. Otherwise, for $600, I'd look at the Surface Go 2 if I want something very portable with low power consumption.