Powerful PC in your POCKET
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
2,718 words · ~13 min read
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inside this box i have an engineering sample an early
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unit of the successor to the wildly
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successful crowdfunded gpd pocket it's
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nice to have a crowdfunding campaign work out once in a while isn't it
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so this right here is a full-fledged quad-core pc that
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per the name fits in your pocket or at least in my pocket
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i have pretty i have pretty big pockets it's not about the size of the pockets
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it's about the man who wears the pocket kit it doesn't matter anyway the point
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is they've made a bunch of changes both in terms of ergonomics and performance
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and we are going to take a look at it
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after i tell you about our sponsor origin pc origin pc's evo 15s is only
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now the big message from gpd's uh reviewers guide materials was really one
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about performance because we're going from atom course
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to actual full-fledged laptop cores in
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the pocket too now we only get two of them but i'm still expecting performance
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to be dramatically better because atom cores
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are dog slow
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but with even with that said my main problem with the original pocket wasn't
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actually the performance it was really the the usability of the device starting
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with io oh are both of these dead
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gosh darn it i will say this performance wise i mean
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based on how much further along we are in the setup process here you can see
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that it definitely makes a difference
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even if it wasn't something that had stood out to me at the time so here
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let's run through the physical changes while i wait for some stuff to install
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here so we've got usb type-c for charging on
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the right that's the same as before we've got a usb type a for whatever it
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is that you could want to plug into it that's the same as before but while last
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time we had our headphone jack as well as a micro HDMI on the right side
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now we turn it over to the other side and we've got no micro HDMI although
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honestly given that we live in the dongle age now
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thank you apple for that uh that doesn't bother me micro HDMI is a
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super fragile connector and i would much rather have this
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so we've got another full size type a and our headphone jack over on the other
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side along with a micro sd slot so if you've
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got one of those amazing little uh high capacity micro sd cards like i will
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hopefully be able to find extremely quickly
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here then you can add up to
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512 gigs of storage to this thing on top
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of the 128 gigs that it already comes
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with because it should be sdxc uh is that
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going to work scissors
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there we go that's probably just a tooling issue on
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the early units here so speaking of tooling actually this is a unibody
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construction here so you can see this is a single piece of aluminum all along the
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top here and then they're just putting a bottom cover on it
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the other big change from a usability perspective is the keyboard and mouse
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now okay my initial reaction was that i was
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pretty upset that they had done away with the nipple nose because while the
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nipple mouse isn't my favorite it's sort of making the best of a bad situation
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where you've got very little space to work with and once you get good with it
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you can get pretty good and what they replaced it with is this little
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what it is is okay you know normally the way a mouse works is you've got an
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optical sensor in it and then you move it around on a surface the way this
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works is they've got a stationary optical sensor under this little square
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right here and then you move a textured surface which i guess would be your
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finger in this case over top of it so what you end up doing is you end up
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needing quite a few motions in order to move all the way across the screen
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now what i also couldn't figure out at first
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was how to drag things because initially i thought as soon as i run out of finger
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runway that's as far as i can drag things because when you go to the edge
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it doesn't keep going like it would on a track pad or on a nipple
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but fortunately they actually did think of this if you use your thumb a it
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doesn't require quite as many swipes just because you've got a larger surface
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here and b you've actually got left and right clicks here that are built into
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the top left corner of the device so if you can you can click and you can drag
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something to your heart's content just like that so you end up with this kind
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of like game controller style ergonomics
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to it that works really well
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especially when you consider how much better of a keyboard experience you're
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getting this drove me nuts the fact that here
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like look at this look at this from an angle here the fact that this space bar
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was so hard to press without interfering with the left click or bumping your
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thumb on the bottom of the chassis here so it's pretty short which means it's not
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natural to hit with your left thumb you've got to kind of reach for it
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all right period and question mark are in very unusual
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locations i do appreciate the full size arrow keys this time around you can kind
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of see some of the gaming dna of gpd
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that's actually short for gamepad digital with that some games do like a nice
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full-sized arrow key so i'm glad to see that but the one
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huge sin that i wish they had changed is i wish it had two shift keys with that
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said compared to these key clusters like this
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and you know putting stuff like this over here
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this is something that i could at least eventually get used to they've done away
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with useless stuff like caps lock stuff you really don't need on a highly mobile
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experience like this one now i want to take a look at performance so now they
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don't intend for this to be a gaming machine but of course we're going to try
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it so while we wait for that to load up though let's talk about what we might expect
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and what kind of specs there are in here because it wasn't that long ago
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that it wasn't even realistic to build an entire computer in this kind
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of a form factor at all and we've gone from there to now
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this guy actually having very similar specs
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to the new microsoft surface go
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all right so this gives us a good look at things in here so right there
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that's our core m3 7y 30 CPU so that's
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dual cores at one to two gigahertz and
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change but what's important about those cores
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is that those are actually haswell cores
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so this is the same type of course that gets used in a normal notebook or even a
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desktop machine 7th gen course then
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right next to it here we've got 4 gigs of RAM although it's available with up
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to 8 gigs then we've got a 128 gigs of
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storage i'm pretty sure that's that then we've got a cooling fan here that's just
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got a single radiator and a single heat pipe right there and then we've got a
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pretty decent sized 3 400 milliamp hour battery and that's pretty much it for
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the internals i guess i never mentioned right this is an hips 1280 did i say
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1280 sorry i mean 1900 by 1200 display
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pretty darn good what are these frame rates like so we're
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running at 1280 by 720
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low in tomb raider but given that um
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no one probably expected to be running triple a games even older ones on a
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machine like this i would actually say the i'd call this
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like probably 10 to 15 FPS that we're getting right now is pretty darn
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impressive i mean you'll be able to easily play games like you know old
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retro games like age of empires 2 hd or whatever the case may be on something
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like this now this is cool so the fan
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can actually make i'd say a fair bit of noise it's
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definitely audible but what's neat is that if you want it to not turbo up
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they've actually got a dedicated button to turn the fan off and go into a low
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power silent mode although i wouldn't expect to be running any games with it
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like that got it got it
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where where's the enter
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shut up all right so to have a look at the performance improvements we've got
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the original pocket we've got the pocket two and then for the sake of
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completeness we've got the pentium 4415
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y equipped surface go higher base clock
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but no boost so
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problem is that especially with these low power machines it's hard to find a
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chance to benchmark them because this one's got 60 of its CPU being sucked up
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by dism host servicing process
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desktop with anti-malware service executable just like random Windows crap
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that's running in the background 80
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87 microsoft this is your computer
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why you do this 90 so for our cinebench run we've got the
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original pocket the pocket 2 with the
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m 7y 30 CPU and then we've got the pentium 4415y
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in the surface go so let's go
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ahead and start them all oh yeah i guess they all have touch screens so i could just
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boop boop oh that one's started wait what what is
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going on here oh wow that one took that long just to start so
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you'll notice here that it's still got four boxes that's because this is a
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hyper-threaded processor and it is just
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creaming four true cores over here so turbo boost is
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giving us a clear advantage even though its base clock is lower it's
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turboing up higher than the surface go oh it also has a lot more level three
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cash four megs versus two megs so the performance story is looking pretty good
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here at 177 i mean that's still not
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earth shattering performance this is still slower than like a a core ii quad
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q6600 from literally 10 years ago but
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that's 10 faster than the surface go at 160 and
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whatever that works out to a lot a lot a lot faster than 120 for the old pocket
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and the remarkable thing is that yeah even though it's slower than a desktop
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CPU from 10 years ago that's a desktop
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CPU this literally fits in your pocket oh it
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should be noted they're changing some of the buttons though so this is going to
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be tab and these they're all kind of moving around it's for the better though
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it's for the better and now Linus will watch his favorite youtuber Linus purely
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by how many views something gets on youtube because the usability of that thing the
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speakers on this thing not amazing and i use the term speakers
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loosely because there's only one and it
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actually fires up through the the holes
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around the the keys so it doesn't yeah it doesn't sound that
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great but we can play back 1080p videos
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and only suck back about 11 to 13 of the
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CPU that is not too shabby
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max screen brightness is not bad either like i wouldn't want to be watching in
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direct sunlight or anything but it's very comfortable even under
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direct overhead lighting here you know what all this talk of
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that decent performance actually gets me thinking
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while gpd according to their marketing anyway might envision their user as like
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you know dainty ladies and coffee shops
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i see it as more of like uh
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like a power user on the go where you
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might want to have the the flexibility to either have something super portable
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albeit with limited functionality
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or the ability to use the device as like a
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mobile almost desktop experience
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so let's try that we've got a type c dongle
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with a power in on the one side here we've got now wired Ethernet and let's
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get photoshop installed and see how usable this is the world-renowned
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photoshop expert edsel was called to work on a rare one-of-a-kind Linus tech
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tip's thumbnail hold on i think i still have silent mode on
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oh okay well hold on was it slow yeah yeah
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okay so like every time i select a thing it does the waiting
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i don't think i've ever had that happen before okay
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what like is the RAM might be the RAM
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yeah we've only got four gigs there is an 8 gig model though
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oh pixel art that's amazing
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okay so summary then i think
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it's not a great system to use
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on its own like if you have other options yeah but this actually reminds
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me of that time when you asked me to uh edit a thumbnail and all i had was my
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phone and i remoted in and edited a thumbnail on my phone right
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this would be better than that this would be way better than
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dinking around on my phone okay
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so it's not perfect and there are definitely still some
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compromises that you're making when you have a machine that is small enough to
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fit in your pocket but for the price that they're asking which is actually
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really similar to the surface go
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for more performance and a keyboard that
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again isn't perfect but is included
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it looks pretty darn good and i think they're going to have another successful
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crowdfunding campaign on their hands here
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speaking of successful private internet access is the way to be
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successfully protected on the internet pia has clients available for Windows
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otherwise going to be geo-blocked like if you want to watch the bbc from
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somewhere else you can even use a vpn like pia to save money on flights you
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can check out the video that we're going to have coming about that very very soon
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and if you want to hook yourself up with pia today check them out at the link in
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are using the internet from so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this
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