We have seen a lot of unique Mini & Portable PC designs over the past few years but nothing comes close to this new design which packs a fully functional AMD Ryzen 7 8840U PC within a foldable keyboard.
Chinese PC Maker Cleverly Hides A Fully Functional AMD Ryzen 7 8840U PC Within A Keyboard,
Ling-Long, a PC manufacturer based in China, has come forward with a clever solution for a fully portable and functional PC. The idea is a combination of a Mini PC with a laptop-centric design in the way that the PC isn't a Mini PC since those require a power source to boot them up & it's also not a laptop because you aren't getting any display with the machine but being fully functional means that you can just hook it up with a display & mouse and well, you're all set. To demo its new PC design, Ling-Long showcased how you can fit the entire product within your pockets and take it anywhere with you.
The Mini & Portable PC market is evolving into something we would've never expected, considering that just a few years ago, it was all about Intel's NUC products & some other mainstream company releasing the "traditional and old" boxy design. While we certainly saw a bump in performance capabilities, there was little to no innovation in the overall design, but it looks like the trend is shifting. Products like the Cybertruck mini-PC show that the markets are indeed moving towards unique designs.
Ling-Long drew parallels with Apple's Macbook and Mac mini systems and said they wanted to create something that would take "compactness and functionality" to a whole new level with mini-PCs. Linglong says their product employs a "unibody" design, meaning it's a single-molded unit with a dedicated converting mechanism. For those still confused about the product, it's a "mini-PC in a keyboard" or probably the other way around.
Let's talk about the onboard specifications. Ling-Long's "keyboard" PC features an AMD's Ryzen 7 8840U APU, which packs 8 cores based on the Zen 4 core architecture, up to 5.1 GHz clock speeds, 16 threads, and a Radeon 780M iGPU with a total of 12 compute units. With the use of AMD's Hawk Point APU, Linglong aims not to compromise on performance at all despite the compactness of its product.
The keyboard being the chassis has two compartments, one housing the main PC which comes with a single active-blower fan with a copper heatsink which dissipates hot air out of the vents on the front and backside while the second compartment houses the battery pack. The whole unit measures 15x10cm and weighs just 800 grams.
The device comes with 16GB/32GB configurations for memory and 512GB/1TB for storage, which is yet again quite decent. The unit hosts a 60Wh (16000 maH) battery & features a dedicated "Mini-Touch" touchpad for enhanced accessibility. The onboard software also comes with three modes which include an Efficiency, Balanced & Performance profile that can be set according to your preferences. The company claims that the PC can last 10 hours in light workloads, 6 hours in media playback, and around 4 hours in gaming workloads. The PC will also come with a 100W Fast power adapter and can also be charged using a power bank like a typical smartphone.
For pricing, Ling-Long's keyboard mini-PC will retail at 4699 RMB or $646 US for the 16GB & 512GB configuration and 5,699 RMB or $784 US for the 32GB & 1TB configuration.
Well, full marks for efforts by the firm, but the use-case here is indeed questionable. This mini-PC certainly won't give you hardcore gaming performance, and thermals will still be a question with the product. But, given that it's something innovative, we won't argue about it much.
News Source: Bilibili
