Chinese hardware company Linglong has announced a surprising new product — a powerful mini PC hidden inside a foldable keyboard. When closed, the device measures just 15cm x 10cm and weighs 800 grams, but it houses an AMD Ryzen 7 8840U processor with up to 32GB RAM and 1TB of storage. The keyboard even includes a mini touchpad, meaning the only peripheral missing is a display.
A portable computer without a display might seem a little odd, but you’re probably surrounded by more potential displays than you think — phones, tablets, TVs, monitors, VR headsets — all of these can be connected to the keyboard PC. This means you can use your phone on the go, connect to the hotel TV while traveling, or hijack any monitor at work. To help you connect to any display you want, the device has a USB 3.0 port, a USB 4 Type-C port, a USB 3.2 Type-C port, and Bluetooth. It even has a fan inside to keep things cool.
Linglong claims its keyboard PC can handle 10 hours of light office work, six hours of media playback, and around four hours of gaming. One thing to keep in mind about these numbers, though, is that they don’t consider the kind of display being used. If you connect to a display that needs to borrow power from the computer, for instance, your battery life will decrease by quite an amount.
Mini PCs are a growing niche, but in many ways, they provide answers to questions that most people just never ask. Most of us, when we need to take a computer somewhere, simply grab a laptop and a size-appropriate bag to carry it in. Maybe we’re not that excited about dragging it around with us all day, but that’s just what we have to do.
Mini PCs, on the other hand, seem to be aimed at people whose desire to leave their bag behind outweighs the need to take the computer. Instead, they want to happily slip their mini PC into their back pocket and just hope that wherever they’re going has peripherals that will be comfortable to use. (And no, connecting your keyboard PC to a smartphone would not count as comfortable.)
But even if the pocket PC sounds great to you, there’s also the price to consider — the 16GB/512GB version will cost $645, and the 32GB/1TB version will cost $780. These aren’t prices for the international market, however. Currently, Linglong only has plans to sell 200 units to beta testers in China, and we don’t know if or when sales will begin worldwide.
