Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Edit 08/29/2020: I'm sad to report a flaw. The hinge drag breaks, and the screen is just floppy, completely loose. Lanruo was very good and helped me get a replacement machine since repairing was not possible during Covid19. The first machine broke after 8 months of use. The second one broke after about 3 weeks. I do open and close the lid a lot, but I wouldn't say more than 10 times a day, GPD needs to do something about this. Even counting the use time of my second machine I have not made it to a full 12 months of use time. This is my favorite of all the GPD line, but they really need to make the hinge reliable, especially for a machine that they claim is durable and will stand up to being bounced around in a toolbox. At this point I am waiting around for Lanruo, GPD, somebody, to help me get this fixed for a second time. Come on people, this is 2020, engineering hinges to fail is not a good idea. 1 star should do it. My money is currently considered very wasted indeed. Original review: I'm typing this on the micro, yes really on the internal keyboard. First off, I'm totally blind, so my ideals will differ a little. This is a very long review though, but I think this may be insightful. I do recommend anyone interested give this a read though. I'm going to get geeky in a bit, a lot of what I have to say will have meaning for the mainstream, and I do answer some questions here that I had before I received the Micro. Blind folks have been using small devices like this for years. We habitually call our machines note takers. They generally contain a braille input keyboard, maybe a braille output display, are about the size of the GPD micro, most often have built in speech output, and most always cost around 6 times as much as this machine. Note takers generally use either non mainstream operating systems also, or antiquated versions of something mainstream, like a very old port of Android, with a skin on it to make the interface more linear. This is all to give a context as to where I'm coming from here, and might especially sing to other potential blind customers. We do have a windows 10 based option, the Elbraille. It runs an expensive JAWS screen reader to provide speech, and you also put a Focus Braille display in it, like it is a dock for the display. The dock runs a price of around $1300. Enter GPD. All of GPD's windows based machines are perfectly usable by the blind. The keyboards of these machines all pose interesting problems when it comes to the fancy additional sometimes complicated and acrobatic keyboard key combinations we rely on to run the screen reader, but it all works with a degree of additional patience. The pocket variant of GPD's offerings is a little extra bothersome, because most of the special keys we use, tab, caps lock, insert etc, are placed at the top, out of their normal positions. This usually just means learning new finger contortions to continue doing the same things, meanwhile the keyboard on the pocket2 is good enough that with some practice one might type at a decent clip comfortably. The Micro, on the other hand, puts most keys either in the correct places, or close to it. There are a few exceptions. There is still no context menu key, but big laptops today omit that also. The caps lock and tab keys are however in the proper place, so many screen reader commands become more natural. One oddity with the Micro is that left shift does not send if pressed in combination with caps lock. So caps lock+left shift+b, to check battery status globally, doesn't work, but caps lock+right shift+b does. All this goes to say that if you use a lot of the so-called special keys, the Micro is actually closer to a normal layout. Especially once you grant that it actually has a right shift, when the pocket2 does not. At this point I have success with every screen reader function directly on the internal keyboard, and I have not needed to remap anything with sharp keys, nor adjust the keys the screen reader uses to do any function. The number row is doubled up. They have two rows. The second row from the top is grave accent, just below escape, right where it belongs, and the 1 through 5, dash, and equals. The top row is escape, 6 through 0, volume down, and volume up. To get function keys, press fn and the number, e.g. fn+4 for f4. F11 and f12 are accomplished by fn and the volume down or volume up respectively. This is impressively common sense. The reason for doubling the number row is to provide a space for the touch pad in the upper right hand of the keyboard. I can't really use a touch pad efficiently, and I kept clicking things while reaching near it to hit volume up or equals etc, so I turned it off in device manager. I would have liked to have left it on and just disabled tap to click, in loo of using the left, middle and right mouse buttons available on the left end just above the keyboard, but I haven't found a way to stop tap to click yet. Interestingly, for some reason multifinger gestures to scroll continue to work with the touch pad disabled, weird. The pocket 2 contains a silicone covered strip above the keyboard with a few button functions, like the fan noise toggle and volume. The buttons, I have been informed, are difficult to feel, somewhat like using a microwave's buttons, where you can't really feel where what is, and you just sort of press here and there looking for places that depress, and hope you got lucky and hit the one you wanted. The micro doesn't have this. We just have physical out in the open mouse buttons, and the slider switch that controls the fan. The volume is on the keyboard itself, as mentioned earlier. The right most two buttons on the top row. Brightness down and up is fn+u and fn+i respectively. These are improvements over the way the pocket2 handles these issues. The keyboard is fairly hard to touch type on. I have taken to using my first 3 fingers of each hand, using my fourth on both hands for just being stationary and kind of keeping things grounded. My right tends to hang out on the enter key, wile my left on caps lock. I hit p with my third finger, for instance. It's awkward, but not out of the question. The buttons act like those on a cell phone. They click, are hard to press, are very close together, and have little travel. It's easier to type on a desk, because the pressure needed to get the keys going bounces the machine about disconcertingly when just on a knee or on your belly, etc. If I'm really gonna be banging in some serious word processing, it's to my trusty Logitech k380 bluetooth keyboard, or I just use my big laptop. I typed this entire review on the internal however, so take this as some idea of what's possible. The fan is managed by an actual sliding switch. When switched to the left, fan is off. This is not like the noise level control of the pocket2, here off means off. This is good, because the fan is noisy. It's not terribly bothersome in person, but to anyone listening through your microphone the fan is very loud. Skype with the fan on and using internal microphone is not a nice thing. Luckily, the passive cooling aspect of this machine's configuration is adequate. Speaking of the microphone, we come to my least favorite thing. This machine is extremely bad with handling noise. In the aforementioned Skype call, you don't use your computer or really even move your hands on it. If you do, you make such a racket that you fade the other caller or callers out and can't make out what they're saying, which probably amounts to "damn you're noisy, stop that wouldya?" I have attempted to improve the situation by turning the mic gain down and such, and tweaking the boost. It's a total loss. The only real solution here is to wear a headset that provides an external microphone, or type on a separate keyboard, or just talk and don't use your computer at the same time. I am finding this to be a large downer, if I eventually return my machine this will be the main reason for it. Battery. I can get around 9 hours under very light load. I don't need the screen, so I have the brightness at 0. This machine does not allow projecting to second screen only when there is no actual second screen available, so that method of blackening the screen and getting a considerable battery life boost is unavailable. I find the battery good enough. It holds up reasonably well under heavy load. Average is indeed about 6. The processor is what I really love about this machine. The max clock rate is 2.4 ghz. It has a thermal design policy of 10 watts, and the computer itself provides all of that for it. I find it responsive for most things. It isn't as fast as my bigger, way more expensive laptop, but it's also not slow by any means. It browses the web just fine, boots quickly, etc. The sound card seems to be efficient, the screen reader responds to key presses with speech output eagerly and most of the time before I get the button released. It's a gleefully snappy little machine. I ran CPUZ 1.8 CPU stress test while a friend with the m3y30 version of the pocket 2 did the same. With our fans both on, the pocket started out staying even with me, but shortly fell away to a pretty low scoreof around 460, while mine stayed steady at 730 for as long as I wanted. The cpu is limited by wattage in the pocket2, more than heat constraints. The cpu in the Micro is only limited by heat. I had to turn my fan off to get the temp to go above 160 degrees f to discover that. At about 190 the clock rate began dropping to prevent the temp from climbing any higher. The drops in clock speed started out coming far apart, for very little time. They got closer and closer together and lasted longer the longer I let it run. About 25 minutes into the stress test with no fan I was still beating the pocket who's fan was on the noisy mode, with a score for me of about 530. The lowest clock speed I noticed was 1.7ghz. Very respectable in my book. Meanwhile the machine was not that hot to the touch. I didn't have trouble holding onto any parts of the case. When I turn the fan switch on, while the stress test was still under way the cpu actually was cooled enough that it was staying clocked at 2.4ghz again. Also very respectable in my book. The ram is supposed to be ddr4 here, where on the pocket, apparently even the newest m3 8100 version, is ddr3. The machine sleeps and wakes up unfailingly. I have it configured to do nothing when I close the lid. The power button puts it to sleep. This way I can elect to leave it on and stick it in a pocket or a bag and let it do what it will. It has yet to do anything wrong when I open the lid. It's on and the screen reader is talking and being responsive about as soon as I can get positioned on the keyboard. I'm very pleased with this aspect. The only complaint I can make here is that if the lid is shut while not being asleep, it can press buttons with pressure on the lid, it most often seems to be tab, and my screen reader will be babbling away about what ever element just got focused. So far as I'm aware however, while pressing buttons on the keyboard does wake the machine, it doesn't seem to be doing so if the lid remains closed, unless I just haven't managed to depress any buttons while sleepy yet. I like the WiFi well enough. It's Intel AC3165. It could be worse. It does what I need a tiny pc to do fine. In case the picture isn't clear, or blind customers want to know, here's a description of the ports.Back, from left to right: RJ45 Ethernet 1gbps, USB type C, this is where you charge it, though it works as a host as well, two USB type A, full sized HDMI, Serial Port. This is the big one that looks sort of like a backwards VGA display port. Left, from back to front: USB type A, Micro SD. This sd slot is nice. The card goes in too far for easily bumping it and popping your potentially valuable card and or data out, like I did with my AsusTeK T100 tablet. Never did find it again. Front, on the very left corner is the lanyard mounting holes, and then right next to it it the 3.5mm audio, and that's everything. I can fit this in some of my pockets, but not all. Some of my pants and shorts are too small. I do have a shirt with a pocket big enough while most of my shirt pockets are not, so I call this hit and miss. I like plunking this down in the glovebox in the car. There's a little slot below the head unit, presumably for cell phones. This fits in there perfectly, and I run my retractable male to male patch cable from it to the Auxiliary jack on the head unit, then I can play my music off the sd card on the radio. My phone is one of those fancy ones with that feature wherein you have no headset jack so this actually is helpful, especially because the van doesn't have bluetooth.