Rip the display off a laptop, snap its keyboard in the middle, and you’ve got this portable PC you can stick in a pocket
Modern laptops are remarkably capable PCs but even the smallest and lightest of them aren’t especially portable. It’s not like you can stick one in a pocket, for example. One start-up in China, though, reckons it has the perfect solution by eschewing the display altogether and fitting a hinge in the keyboard, so the whole PC really can be stuffed down the back of your pants.
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The new manufacturer, Ling Long, launched its seemingly unnamed new product on Bilibili (via Tom’s Hardware) by doing what I’ve just mentioned above—taking the PC out of a back pocket and unfolding it to show a compact, if somewhat chunky, keyboard. There’s no display and only has a tiny trackpad, so it’s certainly not a proper laptop. It’s not a handheld gaming PC, either, as there are no integrated thumbsticks or triggers. So what exactly is it?
Sporting ‘designed by Ling Long’, what you’ve got are two frames connected via a hinge, with a 60 Wh battery in the left piece and a small motherboard housing a Ryzen 7 8840U processor, soldered DDR5 RAM, an NVMe M.2 2230 socket, and a bunch of USB ports in the other piece. That AMD APU is pretty much the same chip that’s in the Asus ROG Ally (a Ryzen Z1 Extreme), albeit one with a fancy NPU (neural processing unit).
With eight cores, 16 threads, a 5.1 GHz boost clock and a 30 W TDP, it’s a perfectly capable little chip. Graphics duties are handled by its integrated Radeon 780M with 768 RDNA 3 shaders. If you’ve ever used a Steam Deck or ROG Ally, you’ll know that this is good enough for 1080p gaming on low settings in many of today’s games.
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However, gaming doesn’t seem to be Ling Long’s primary target, rather it’s for office workers who constantly move about and who don’t want to carry around a laptop. It obviously relies on the location having a suitable monitor and mouse, though. The lack of a HDMI port means that a USB adaptor or cable will be required, too.
But those are the sacrifices needed to make something that’s 15 x 10 cm (5.9 x 3.9 inches) in size when folded and only weighs 800 g (1.8 lbs). The makers are hoping to offer models with either 16 or 32 GB of DDR5 RAM, plus 512 GB or 1 TB of PCIe 4.0 storage. For an office laptop, those figures are more than enough, but the real figures of note are the suggested prices.
At CNY 2,999 (roughly $413) for the 16 GB/512 GB model and CNY 3,599 (£495) for the 32 GB / 1 TB version, that’s quite a bit cheaper than an Asus ROG Ally. However, that does at least come with a display and attached controllers, though it just has one USB Type-C port for attaching any peripherals and you’d never want to use its seven-inch screen to do any office work.
Whether Ling Long plans to offer its portable PC outside of China is unknown at this stage but a few retailers may be willing to give it a go. I think the folding chassis design is a little unnecessary (it does make the whole thing look very chunky) but it’s nice to see something a little different in the vast sea of identical laptops and handheld PCs.
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