Yeah, the Gen 1 pocket was quite questionable (I had one too), mostly because the hardware back then was hacked together. Support came mostly from the community rather than GPD as they were already working on the next gen Win and Pocket (which makes sense, their goal was never to make a LTS device).
I remember the Gen 1 pocket as having these problems:
- The display was actually taken from a tablet display so it was oriented as portrait in hardware and flipped to landscape in software. So you often got cases where Windows updates, entering the bios, or installing Linux would start off with the wrong UI orientation.
- The screen hinge cover was plastic and the fitment of it against the aluminum unibody shell was not perfect. It would kind of obscure the vent and sometimes squeaked.
- The PD charging was ... poorly implemented. It would only try to negotiate 12V PD, which most chargers and power banks did not support. There were also issues with passthrough charging via docks and just UBS-C dock compatibility issues everywhere (though USB-C docks are not perfect with even proper computers from mainstream OEMs even today).
- The cooling design was very beta and you often had throttling issues and the CPU not boosting up (0.9 GHz is not a fun place to be at). Again community fixes existed but definitely an experimental device.
This space has gotten considerably more mature over the years. By the time I moved to the OneMix 2S Yoga, I essentially didn't have any negative experiences with the device at all (my only gripe is that the active pen tech requires AAAA batteries and unless you take them out they'll just run out every month with or without use). In fact the new GPD Win Max 2 seems exceedingly attractive since they apparently still listen to enthusiast community feedback unlike regular laptop OEMs... Ryzen 6800U, 16:10 display, 16-32G RAM, dual M.2 slots for 2 NVME ssds, 4G LTE modem, thunderbolt support... the list goes on.
If I had to say, the slightly rough part with enthusiast UMPCs is that they end up being a "committee designed" device that crams in a bunch of features to maximize the audience they appeal to , so they don't have any consistent design language. Things will change drastically across each generation, unlike traditional OEMs.
I remember the Gen 1 pocket as having these problems:
- The display was actually taken from a tablet display so it was oriented as portrait in hardware and flipped to landscape in software. So you often got cases where Windows updates, entering the bios, or installing Linux would start off with the wrong UI orientation.
- The screen hinge cover was plastic and the fitment of it against the aluminum unibody shell was not perfect. It would kind of obscure the vent and sometimes squeaked.
- The PD charging was ... poorly implemented. It would only try to negotiate 12V PD, which most chargers and power banks did not support. There were also issues with passthrough charging via docks and just UBS-C dock compatibility issues everywhere (though USB-C docks are not perfect with even proper computers from mainstream OEMs even today).
- The cooling design was very beta and you often had throttling issues and the CPU not boosting up (0.9 GHz is not a fun place to be at). Again community fixes existed but definitely an experimental device.
This space has gotten considerably more mature over the years. By the time I moved to the OneMix 2S Yoga, I essentially didn't have any negative experiences with the device at all (my only gripe is that the active pen tech requires AAAA batteries and unless you take them out they'll just run out every month with or without use). In fact the new GPD Win Max 2 seems exceedingly attractive since they apparently still listen to enthusiast community feedback unlike regular laptop OEMs... Ryzen 6800U, 16:10 display, 16-32G RAM, dual M.2 slots for 2 NVME ssds, 4G LTE modem, thunderbolt support... the list goes on.
If I had to say, the slightly rough part with enthusiast UMPCs is that they end up being a "committee designed" device that crams in a bunch of features to maximize the audience they appeal to , so they don't have any consistent design language. Things will change drastically across each generation, unlike traditional OEMs.