Modern laptops are remarkably capable PCs but even the smallest and lightest of them aren't especially portable. It's not like you can stick one in a pocket, for example. One start-up in China, though, reckons it has the perfect solution by eschewing the display altogether and fitting a hinge in the keyboard, so the whole PC really can be stuffed down the back of your pants.
The new manufacturer, Ling Long, launched its seemingly unnamed new product on Bilibili (via Tom's Hardware) by doing what I've just mentioned above—taking the PC out of a back pocket and unfolding it to show a compact, if somewhat chunky, keyboard. There's no display and only has a tiny trackpad, so it's certainly not a proper laptop. It's not a handheld gaming PC, either, as there are no integrated thumbsticks or triggers. So what exactly is it?
Sporting 'designed by Ling Long', what you've got are two frames connected via a hinge, with a 60 Wh battery in the left piece and a small motherboard housing a Ryzen 7 8840U processor, soldered DDR5 RAM, an NVMe M.2 2230 socket, and a bunch of USB ports in the other piece. That AMD APU is pretty much the same chip that's in the Asus ROG Ally (a Ryzen Z1 Extreme), albeit one with a fancy NPU (neural processing unit).
With eight cores, 16 threads, a 5.1 GHz boost clock and a 30 W TDP, it's a perfectly capable little chip. Graphics duties are handled by its integrated Radeon 780M with 768 RDNA 3 shaders. If you've ever used a Steam Deck or ROG Ally, you'll know that this is good enough for 1080p gaming on low settings in many of today's games.
However, gaming doesn't seem to be Ling Long's primary target, rather it's for office workers who constantly move about and who don't want to carry around a laptop. It obviously relies on the location having a suitable monitor and mouse, though. The lack of a HDMI port means that a USB adaptor or cable will be required, too.
But those are the sacrifices needed to make something that's 15 x 10 cm (5.9 x 3.9 inches) in size when folded and only weighs 800 g (1.8 lbs). The makers are hoping to offer models with either 16 or 32 GB of DDR5 RAM, plus 512 GB or 1 TB of PCIe 4.0 storage. For an office laptop, those figures are more than enough, but the real figures of note are the suggested prices.
At CNY 2,999 (roughly $413) for the 16 GB/512 GB model and CNY 3,599 (£495) for the 32 GB / 1 TB version, that's quite a bit cheaper than an Asus ROG Ally. However, that does at least come with a display and attached controllers, though it just has one USB Type-C port for attaching any peripherals and you'd never want to use its seven-inch screen to do any office work.
Whether Ling Long plans to offer its portable PC outside of China is unknown at this stage but a few retailers may be willing to give it a go. I think the folding chassis design is a little unnecessary (it does make the whole thing look very chunky) but it's nice to see something a little different in the vast sea of identical laptops and handheld PCs.
