GPD Pocket


ptitSeb said:
I own a 901 too. I just hate it. It's slow, both on the SSD side and CPU side (not even taking about the GPU here). And the SSD size is just too small (I had the 4+8 GB). It was just a complete waste of money. I found the keyboard fine for the size of the device, but that's pretty much it.
All in all, the Pandora (even the CC model) is much more usable than this,
Click to expand...

I just can't resist keeping this off-topic train going.. when the posts inevitably get moved somewhere else please remember this one too mods!

I had one of those Eee 901s and did some of the early development of DraStic on it. This was the only computer I ever used to do development on while in a car, back when I was getting rides to work.

In November 2009 I was stuck in a crummy airport in Belgium after sitting in a badly pressurized airplane while sick.. I couldn't hear out of one ear at all. I decided that the hours of lay over time would be good to make progress on the x86 recompiler. Was surprisingly productive.

Not content with that I tried repeating the experience in August 2011, when I was again sick, exhausted staying up all night waiting for a ride to the airport and hundreds of miles from home, I decided to write some ugly assembly code for the PSX gpu_neon plugin. Only this time it was over ssh so the latency was bad. I don't know why I was so determined to do that.

I must have accidentally stepped on it or something at some point because eventually I noticed the screen was shattered. Good riddance, that thing was a total dog. Even if it was faster than the CC Pandora having to use SDL in Linux removed any possible performance advantage. It took like 10ms just to update a 256x384x32bpp window.

I don't think this was because of the hardware was weaker than the GHz Pandora, I think it was just the software stack. I used the "Eeesy Peasy" Ubuntu spinoff and it was just awful. I don't know if you used a similar distro or stuck with Windows, but even the latter was painful because the video drivers were pretty bad. It wasn't like Pandora where the OS is actually pretty well tuned and optimized for the thing, and you have nice low overhead options for video (and audio)

Eventually did supplemental development on the Cortex-A15 Chromebook Samsung released in October 2012. That was a lot better. Too bad I ended up blowing out the audio circuitry by incorrectly setting up ALSA once.
 
comradekingu said:
Today from the almost department

https://www.pine64.org/?page_id=3707

Looks like this will be very much a bang for bottom price machine, which is in tune with the pine board offerings.
Hopefully the 11.6" uses a different case. There was a lot of complaining about the Pine boards, wonder if it is all solved by now?
Click to expand...

looks like i won't be using shift anymore (11.6", probably hit \ instead!). not that i use it very much now...
 
permanently bound to caps lock :D

[edit] though, for ( and )....

[edit2] i guess you could remap caps to shift...

[edit3] probably should finish that programming language of mine which doesn't care about which parentheses are used where...
 
Exophase said:
I just can't resist keeping this off-topic train going.. when the posts inevitably get moved somewhere else please remember this one too mods!

I had one of those Eee 901s and did some of the early development of DraStic on it. This was the only computer I ever used to do development on while in a car, back when I was getting rides to work.

In November 2009 I was stuck in a crummy airport in Belgium after sitting in a badly pressurized airplane while sick.. I couldn't hear out of one ear at all. I decided that the hours of lay over time would be good to make progress on the x86 recompiler. Was surprisingly productive.

Not content with that I tried repeating the experience in August 2011, when I was again sick, exhausted staying up all night waiting for a ride to the airport and hundreds of miles from home, I decided to write some ugly assembly code for the PSX gpu_neon plugin. Only this time it was over ssh so the latency was bad. I don't know why I was so determined to do that.

I must have accidentally stepped on it or something at some point because eventually I noticed the screen was shattered. Good riddance, that thing was a total dog. Even if it was faster than the CC Pandora having to use SDL in Linux removed any possible performance advantage. It took like 10ms just to update a 256x384x32bpp window.

I don't think this was because of the hardware was weaker than the GHz Pandora, I think it was just the software stack. I used the "Eeesy Peasy" Ubuntu spinoff and it was just awful. I don't know if you used a similar distro or stuck with Windows, but even the latter was painful because the video drivers were pretty bad. It wasn't like Pandora where the OS is actually pretty well tuned and optimized for the thing, and you have nice low overhead options for video (and audio)

Eventually did supplemental development on the Cortex-A15 Chromebook Samsung released in October 2012. That was a lot better. Too bad I ended up blowing out the audio circuitry by incorrectly setting up ALSA once.
Click to expand...
Well, as long as the offtopic train is still going...

I used an EEEpc 901 as my main developement machine for several years. And it was very slow. I used debian stable on it, and apart from crap performance it had one thing going for it. One thing I can't say for any other computer I've ever owned. Every feature of that darn thing worked in linux, and it worked well. The build quality was shit, all it took to kill the keyboard was litterlally one drop of water. When I took it out of service, the plastic holding the hinges had cracked and the metal inserts were rattling about inside the case.

But with some tweaks, it was a perfectly usable machine. Put all webbrowser cache on a tmpfs, and the system would no longer freeze for 5 seconds at every page load. Use OpenGL acceleration, and it would yield decent graphics performance. Don't use the browser to play videos, and it could just about to 720p iirc. At once point I played through Golden sun in No$GBA on it in wine, with acceptable performance. Overall, I found that the games that ran ok on it would also run comparably on a pandora. But the bigger keyboard and higher screen resolution definately made it more useful as a general purpose computer than the pandora.

I had the 4+16 version, I was in the "fuck windows" camp right from the start.
 
The 901 is my waifu. The last and best sub-10 inch netbook. Still use one; didn't think anything could unseat it until the Pyra came along. But the Pocket looks pretty sexy - I've been waiting for someone to make essentially this product (a Macbook-esque EeePC) for ages. I have to say that I'm not sure I like the idea of a keyboard smaller than the 901's unless it can be thumb-typed. It's already a stretch. But I'd like to try one...

As for pocketability, I propose that cross-sectional perimeter, rather than area, is the correct metric. A pocket is a tube of fabric with a finite (and fixed) circumference.

Therefore, the scores:

Pandora: 2*(83+29) = 224
GPD Pocket: 2*(106+23.3) = 258.6
GPD Win: 2*(96+24) = 240
Pyra: 2*(87+32) = 238
Note 3: 2*(79.2+8.3) = 175
and for good measure
EeePC 701: 2*(6.3+1.3)*25.4 = 386
EeePC 901: 2*(6.7+1.3)*25.4 = 406.4 (I could only find the dimensions in inches and I don't have a tape measure - it's probably a slight overestimate because it narrows across the depth)

or, in order: Note 3, Pandora, Pyra, GPD Win, GPD Pocket, and EeePC a long way behind. Interestingly this is also the ordering of their longest dimension i.e. the depth of the pocket you'll need.

That's actually a massive portability upgrade for a netbook. It's only 2cm (less than 9%) bigger around than the Pyra. That seems pretty pocketable, if you have big pockets.

...brb, measuring my pants and jackets.
 
Last edited:
dTal said:
The 901 is my waifu. The last and best sub-10 inch netbook. Still use one; didn't think anything could unseat it until the Pyra came along. But the Pocket looks pretty sexy - I've been waiting for someone to make essentially this product (a Macbook-esque EeePC) for ages. I have to say that I'm not sure I like the idea of a keyboard smaller than the 901's unless it can be thumb-typed. It's already a stretch. But I'd like to try one...

As for pocketability, I propose that cross-sectional perimeter, rather than area, is the correct metric. A pocket is a tube of fabric with a finite (and fixed) circumference.

Therefore, the scores:

Pandora: 2*(83+29) = 224
GPD Pocket: 2*(106+23.3) = 258.6
GPD Win: 2*(96+24) = 240
Pyra: 2*(87+32) = 238
Note 3: 2*(79.2+8.3) = 175
and for good measure
EeePC 701: 2*(6.3+1.3)*25.4 = 386
EeePC 901: 2*(6.7+1.3)*25.4 = 406.4 (I could only find the dimensions in inches and I don't have a tape measure - it's probably a slight overestimate because it narrows across the depth)

or, in order: Note 3, Pandora, Pyra, GPD Win, GPD Pocket, and EeePC a long way behind. Interestingly this is also the ordering of their longest dimension i.e. the depth of the pocket you'll need.

That's actually a massive portability upgrade for a netbook. It's only 2cm (less than 9%) bigger around than the Pyra. That seems pretty pocketable, if you have big pockets.

...brb, measuring my pants and jackets.
Click to expand...

Circumference doesn't work either as volume maximizes at circular. A soda can has a perimiter of 208mm, but is far less pocketable.
 
Perhaps we should define "pocketability". I'm taking it to mean a likelihood index of fitting (at all) in an arbitrary pocket. Neglecting depth, circumference is the appropriate metric for this. Notably, a pint glass has a circumference identical to a Pyra - and "fits" nicely, if uncomfortably, in my jeans pocket.

Now for comfort you're quite correct - flatter is better (puts less tension on the outer garment, cantilevers less weight away from body).

Incidentally I used to frequently carry a TI graphing calculator around with me in my jeans pocket. Its narrow perimeter was about 229mm.
 
vcoleiro1 said:
Yes , GPD will develop the drivers and fully support Ubuntu on the GPD Pocket.
Click to expand...
Does that include mainlining any additional drivers that might be needed? Otherwise their Ubuntu support wouldn't be worth much.
Dell once sold some laptops with Ubuntu preinstalled that needed special ACPI drivers. Dell provided these drivers as blobs, but they only worked with the kernels that were provided by Dell. This led to the awkward situation that users of these Ubuntu laptops had to stick to outdated kernels, sometimes even Ubuntu versions that were no longer supported by Canonical, even if the laptop was still under warranty by Dell.
Eventually the ACPI hacks were reverse-engineered, so these laptops run well under any Linux distribution now. But until then, they were basically designed with an expiry date. So the question is, will there be an expiry date on the GPD Pocket as well?

CommanderB said:
GPD just posted some partly photoshopped pictures of the mockup:
http://boards.dingoonity.org/gpd-windows-devices/gpd-pocket-product-image/
Click to expand...
I guess we'll just have to take your word for it, as dingoonity still hides their content behind a login wall.
 
me too. i like it, i'd probably buy one if the quality is good and the keyboard is decent. (though i'll wait til after the Pyra to see if i have a further "need" like that.)

[edit] what happened to the SD card slot? (i thought there was one...)
 
Last edited:
PowerGod said:
I can see them, no login asked
Click to expand...
You're right, the links to the pictures are in the code of the website.
For some reason my firefox doesn't like the way the pictures are embedded in the post. If I change their links from https to http and back again, then they appear.
 
If it was Linux Friendly, something like this at work would be awesome actually. I have in the past, but I'm a bit hesitant to use the Pandora or the Pyra in the future outside of my office at work because how much it looks like a gaming device.
 
All computers look like gaming devices, because they can be.

They REALLY need to consider putting the trackpoint in a better place.
 
rygD said:
All computers look like gaming devices, because they can be.
Click to expand...
Well except on the Pandora and Pyra there actually is game controls on it. It gets looked at differently in a workplace environment.
 
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