GPD Win Mini Review: Defying the Laws of Physics
GPD Win Mini Review: Defying the Laws of Physics
Here's what the device is if (like me) you didn't know what it was (and, if, maybe like me, you didn't want to watch some random video).
It seems to me that those machines are poor PCs and poor Steam Deck wannabes.
However, they do remind me of my favourite PC of all time, the fabulous Vaio C1 PictureBook by Sony. Mine had 64 Megs of memory (extended to 192 I think) and 12Gigs of disk. And, you bet it ran Linux like a champ (Mandrake, with KDE).
To be fair, the GPD brand has been around for years so it's not like they saw the SteamDeck release and tried to profit on it. They've been THE brand that has been trying to push the portable gaming pc paradigm for a decade, until Valve just "made it right" (price, performances and usability).
It doesn't speak of the quality of the products nor the viability of their specific solutions, just a reminder they're not a "random" brand.
Fair.
I see they have a number of little machines that can come in very handy in a lot of cases. So while I'm not convinced by that one specifically, it doesn't reflect on the whole lineup. A lot of their gadgets are quite nice.
However I'm more convinced by their "tech in a pocket" systems than by the gaming ones.
Without GPD and others, there likely wouldn't even be a Steam Deck. They really paved the way and made the case for handheld PCs, which proved to Valve that there was a market worth investing in.
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You clearly havent looked at their micropc and pocket 3 with the serial port and display in capabilities. Pretty awesome.
True, I hadn't, and it certainly is.
Between ARM chips rapidly improving and x86 APUs really maturing I think portable gaming is in for a very interesting decade.
I'm honestly placing my bets that Qualcomm Oryon (their next chips intended for PCs) will massively shake the handheld and laptop industry next year. It feels like nobody's trying for ARM desktop chips outside of Apple and there's huge potential there.
Will be interesting if valve can make proton work on arm with similar results. Maybe that will be steam deck 3?
That's gonna depend a lot on Microsoft fixing windows on arm. Linux on arm exists but most people are "comfortable" (complacent) with windows
Looks like the heat issues are still there. Not sure what more they can do besides reinventing the whole thing. But this is so small, I love what they tried to do with this. He’s right that the GPD4 makes more sense and is kind of the best of both worlds.
This device was sent by the manufacturer to the reviewer, but they haven't disclosed this relationship.
Would this work as a portable computer that you can use at home and at the office? Like connecting it to a big monitor, a good keyboard and a mouse when using it, and disconnecting them otherwise so you're good to go. Like some kind of very expensive raspberry pi or something.
Yeah, they do sell a dock for it actually.