Dingoonity.org

So it looks like GPD are exploring whether they can use the same liquid cooling heat pipe they use in some modern smart phones like the Galaxy S7.

Heat pipes are only useful for effectively moving energy away since they operate by evap and condens in a very specific range. A better solution that a pipe is the flat vapour chamber.
Those vapour chamber designs could provide a solution but in general they aren't cheap they will add an easy 20 dollars to the BOM. What you will get in return is a very even temperature profile since energy can flow into all sections very fast.

I'm myself more concerned with the key mapping in a windows environment. One of the great things about the GPD XD is that emulators were easily mapped even touch screen games were easily mapped to the controls with the software that came with it. The GPD XD did this incredibly well.

Windows however is a pain playing emulation games with a controller whether it is Dolpin, PPSSPP or PCSX2 it is a pain every time. Actually so much that it is usually less cumbersome to just use the actual console. (I no longer have a working PSP nor PS2 both are broken)

Another major concern is how usable windows will be on such a tiny screen. I've tried remote desktop streaming and both at low as well as high DPI it was completely unusable on the GPD XD. The GPD Win will have a similarly sized screen so I doubt this will work well.

I'm not sure how I feel about the keyboard I think the key spacing on my 2 in one tablet is already quite scarce (it's 10.1") besides this there is the key feedback which may or may not be good enough.

I think I'm going to still order one however because otherwise I will have to judge it by reviews again. The GPD XD didn't disappoint actually it was so very amazing everything did work out of the box only minor design flaws to me.
I don't really like the thumb sticks for example, they sometimes don't seem to respond well when I push them almost all the way but not quite into a corner.

Personally I would like to see the following upgrades worked into the GPD XD 2:
- LTE support

- 64 bit ARM SoC (Perhaps by that time AMD's Zen based ARM SoCs (K12?) will be ready) (or another Mediatek SoC that is fabbed on a solid 14nm process)

- Bigger internal memory (128GB standard would be a nice start)

But I'm not sure whether or not other people would want to pay extra for those. I would actually the GPD XD is pretty good for it's price and I wouldn't mind paying a bit extra to make it even better.

Super unfortunate they refuse to change the l3/r3 layout, even putting them on the top of that stack would be a huge difference maker.  The mouse keyboard toggle was the deciding factor keeping me from preordering.  Frankly, its a compelete wasted opportunity if they're going to disable all the gamepad functionality and not provide any kind of custom button mapping for keyboard/mouse games in that mode.  If performance is solid with reviews, its still a viable emulation platform, but to be fair, Im definitely not paying 500$ for a device with so many compromises, especially when the parted cost isn't even close to that number.  All things being equal, Im a lot more likely to pick up whatever device nvidia releases later this year, or even the JXD k1 based handheld over this at half the price.  With intel's withdraw from the ultra mobile chip market, the future is bleak for low power targeted x86 games and software.  I guess everything is going to come down to timing, I will absolutely buy the nvidia product if it releases before this does, otherwise its final offer price will decide if gpd or jxd gets my money.

I'd be amazed if the XD2 used anything but the RK3399 which is a 64 bit ARM SOC.

I looked up this Rock chip chip A72 cores so that would be amazing. Bigger high IPC cores is great for emulation and the clocks are also high apparently ~2.0 GHz being listed. What seems a bit disappointing is there is no mention of DX12 support though with only 2 cores it may not be necessary. (I would rather still have it supported)
Rockchip themselves don't mention a node on which the SoC is going to be fabbed I personally think a 16nm TSMC node or a 14nm Samsung/GF node perhaps. They will decide what they want in a node density, cost, leakage, yield etc etc.

I'm quite sure such a chip will easily bring us into Dolphin (NGC titles) territory. (even more reason for them to make the internal memory bigger as GC games are easy 1GB+)

As for the keys on the WIN, they pretty much have gone for the same keys you find on one of those slider keyboards.   
I have two of them, the tactile feedback is good. They are good to type on.  As for spacing, since the keys are small and close together, you find that you need to focus on hitting the centers of the keys, otherwise you can easily hit two keys at once.   About 5 minutes of practice though , and you are good.

The biggest problem with the keyboard IMO (and many others) is the letter keys are shifted to the left.  This will mean that you will be typing with one thumb pretty much, as all but 4 keys are on the left side of the WIN.

All but the K, L, O and P keys are on the left side , I showed in this image a long while back how it will be an issue  -> http://i.imgur.com/3fcWwao.jpg

Unfortunately the picture GPD showed of the GPD WIN with keyboard labels printed brought home the issue I have been mentioning. Look at the pic below that GPD posted, you can clearly see the issue I truied to convey all that time ago. The center of the device is the left edge of the K key. It's going to be a stretch (literally) to even be able to hit the space bar with your right thumb. The sad thing is, if they had of moved the right columns of keys to the left side. That would center the keyboard nicely. I'm still dumb founded they didn't make that change, or why they didn't catch the issue themselves

I don't see me typing on this thing a lot the arduino software for example is already completely unusable on a 10.1 display even with all kinds of settings adjusted on an even smaller display with a even smaller keyboard it's going to be just not possible.

I saw the picture posted with the line across the center of the device and the two thumbs. Comparing to the GPD XD which is similar size it seems like a major stretch for the left thumb. They could've perhaps used the center colum for not so important keys and some spacing on both sides. That way you would have 2 equally sized blocks containing all the letter that can be operated with both thumbs.

Yeah I caught up with the discussion with Kendy some notion of shell strength which I think it total baloney. Reviewers are probably going to trash the current keyboard design so it really is an absurd choice to keep it as is.

Well the Pandora is a similar beast, and lots of people use it to type on. The Pyra which is the Pandoras successor which went on Pre-order today, will have a similar screen to the WIN. I guess it depends on font size and resolution etc you use.

I just saw that after only 12 hours , the Pyra already has about 250 Pre-orders.  It's flying .

The keyboard on the Pyra is beautiful. Large spacing and backlit what more can you want.

However the Pyra isn't really for me it's not strong enough and it's quite bulky.
Removable battery and all those expansion options along with the ability to swap the SoC at some point sound so very great. However I wish they had put in a more powerful SoC from the beginning. (probably linux support is better with this?)

With intel's withdraw from the ultra mobile chip market, the future is bleak for low power targeted x86 games and software.

Has there been any source of Intel leaving the market entirely?
I've only seen the two sources linked in this thread: One has comments saying "the other one is actually accurate, calm down" and the other says only smartphone SoCs are discontinued. Tablet and up are still going on (and last I checked this was "tablet" level here).

I think they definitely listened to community feedback. The things they didn't do much to change was things they seemed to imply were out of their hands, keyboard layout etc.

They listened to some feed back but not some very important ones, they could have done a much better job.

You are right L3 and R3 are in terrible locations and completely useless when you think about it, this is not the only problem with the keyboard either.

It would have been much better with any of the proposed community keyboard layouts but they stated that the layout was fixed/ couldn't be changed.

The whole indigogo campaign wasn't very well put together but I do believe they have a good company and have tried to gather our input in English forums even though there is an obvious language barrier.

They sold people on the product they intended to make , a product that they seem passionate about with the declaration that they will release this device even if they didn't get the funding they were looking for.

GPD is known as the company that can come up with an idea and 6 months later release a completed device so I wouldn't be too concerned about their ability to achieve this.

This device is a UMPC and not just a mobile gaming device , even the eeepc released by Asus 8 years ago sold for $500 and that was a poorly underpowered device upon release.

I wouldn't worry about heating unless you plan on pushing this device to its absolute limits for extended periods of time, I have used my co-workers tablet which has the same chipset, much thinner and while it did throttle when gaming it didn't get overly hot while playing gaming for a couple hours.

Compared the other UMPC devices on the market like the Pyra , OQO , Sony UX , it is the cheapest and most powerful.

If you plan on getting this device then get it to play classic old windows games like Farcry , Morrowind , Deus Ex , or any PC game from 2007 and earlier.

sorry double post 

What tablet did you use with the same chipset?
Just wondering to see if I could look up some benchmarks or game vids to see what we might expect.
Thanks.

Telcast x98 Pro
It's actually using the lower powered z8500 but it gives a good look at the gaming potential, I wouldn't expect much more out of the z8550 really.

A valid concern here and there's no real fix for it really.

I plan to use the anti malware / virus program with the lowest overhead, it may take a while to figure out what is lightweight but works

I was using MalwareBytes on my OQO which only has a single core 1.6 GHz and 512 MB RAM running Windows 7, this caused Morrowind to slow down by abit 5 frame hit but didn't seem to affect other lower requirement games