Rip the display off a laptop, snap its keyboard in the middle, and you've got this portable PC you can stick in a pocket

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)