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 closed 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
so on paper the p2 max is the closest
thing to a bonafide laptop in gpd's
lineup yet it's got an 8.9 inch screen
so that's about the size of the smallest acer aspire 1 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 lp ddr3 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 i o 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 a's a full size HDMI
and of course an sd and a micro sd 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
give it a sec it's a pretty quick shutdown
dang wow that was a cold boot
not too bad now with that said the fan does ramp up
pretty loud on first boot uh 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 sub-compact 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
it ended up being really well balanced like here's the
thing compared to uh here here we go compared to their pocket too
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 okay 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 uh 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
are 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 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 16 by 10 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
16x9 screen about two and a half percent bigger now how happy you're going gonna
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 percent [ __ ] off 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 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 8100y in this
thing managed to turbo up to 2.6 2.7
gigahertz under full all core loads and i even saw 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 in 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 gen 3 x4 link to the p2 max's
NVMe SSD boot drive translated into
not a 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 premiere pro
workstation but here's a little project that i did as 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 surprisingly responsive to work on
now coming back to some more likely use cases for a machine like this
its ac wi-fi speeds were really good i managed 300 megabit both up and down on
our high speed connection here at 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 league 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 pc's
display except that because this display is so
small it actually ends up looking shockingly
clean oops i suck at this game 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 going to 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 2560x1600 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 inconvenience of pulling
a full-size laptop out of your bag and
the tiny whiny
eye straino vision of watching content on your phone
see look at that it's like right in between
all right 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 onto the board rather than
using a so dim 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 this small
daughter board for io and then finally we've got a pretty good look at the
cooling system here so that's our ah
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 bot for gpd i mean to be clear they've never
sponsored us or anything like that and i've never even met anyone there face to
face i guess i just can 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 gram like yeah it had
some build quality issues and honestly so does the p2 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 dammit they accomplished that so
same thing here yeah you're going to 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 makes sense it charges
off of a flipping 30 watt quick charge
phone adapter that's pretty freaking cool
so even though the p2 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 700 us dollars in the indiegogo campaign i think it's priced
not low but definitely reasonably so thanks for
watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked
it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the
gpd p2 max at the link in the video description also down there is our merch
store which has cool shirts like the one i'm wearing and our community forum which you guys should totally join