GPD Pocket 4 ミニノートPC

First I wanna say that I ditched Windows 11 on this in favor of CachyOS. I also tried Bazzite but CachyOS ended up getting straight up like 20% more battery life on light tasks. So that's what most of my experiences are from.

Screen: Very clear and uniform. Colors and contrast are mediocore. Maximum screen brightness is OK, but minimum brightess isn't quite low enough for comfortably using it in the dark. Some games and Operating Systems get really confused by it and the only resolution that maps correctly to your screen is the native 1600x2560 resolution, all others are rotated into the wrong orientation leading to a tiny image with massive black bars around it.
Keyboard: I'm used to full size german QUERTZ layout so this one is pretty different than I'm used to. I'm still adjusting but layout wise it's OK. Though the keys feel a bit flimsy and some take a bit more additional force to register a press past the tactile click which can lead to missed inputs.
Speakers: Servicable, but not at all impressive. At volume levels of about 40% and above the keyboard can start to resonate and buzz on some sounds.
Microphone: The mic placement makes no sense: It is on the main chassis right next to the touchpad so every single touch, movement and noise from fans and speakers get transferred directly into it. You can't truly fix that without an external mic but it would be much better if it was on the lid instead.
Performance: Pretty impressive for it's size. Games I've only played Phasmophobia and PEAK. Phasmophobia runs incredibly well easily getting well above 100 FPS. PEAK struggles a little but it's perfectly playable. In the firmware settings you can switch the available VRAM between 8 and 16 GB which is neat, although that setting is buried between random stuff.
Fan: Audible, but fairly quiet on idle and light tasks. In firmware settings there's a simple option for custom fan behavior, setting those don't do anything.
Battery life: Not very impressive at all. I'm getting around 3 to 6 hours on regular use but it can down to less than 1 hour on full system utilization. In it's defense though, this is such a small device that you physically can not fit that much more battery inside. My biggest issue with it is that there is no ability to slow charge, so many external batteries, power banks and cables don't work at all.

One of the coolest things you can do with it is put it in tablet mode and put it in a clamp-on tablet controller to effectively turn it into a gaming handheld. I used a Steam Deck before this oe but ended up REALLY missing having a physical keyboard so the pocket's size, versatility and performance are like the perfect mix for me, despite some of it's afforementioned issues. I also had a laptop years ago but barely ended up using it because regular laptop sizes turned out to be just a bit too cumbersome.

The laptop is and has everything you could want from a full-size one (and even more).

So far, I've tested with Windows and it works okay, including LTE modem. The only problematic thing is sleep and wakeup. In 70% cases, the laptop either won't go to sleep (heating up in the case), or goes to sleeps but wakes to a black screen (some workarounds like putting it to sleep again sometimes help). This is definitely not the Modern Standby experience Windows wants from laptops... I tried enabling S2/S3 sleep in UEFI, but the behavior was basically the same. From system log, it seems that the culprit is the fingerprint sensor. I updated its driver to latest version, which helped a bit, but not 100%.

Also, GPD should figure a good and reliable way of distributing firmware updates. When I wanted to download the fingerprint reader driver, the google drive link said that download quota has been reached for that day and that's it.

I really hate the F-keys only via Fn button. Some laptops have these goodies like automatic Fn when Alt is pressed (for Alt+F4 to work, for example).

Using a different than English keyboard in the OS is a good brain training because with the non-standard layout, you have no idea where are all the punctuation marks etc. :)

The fan can get pretty noisy quite easily, but that's understandable with this small body. And there's the easily accessible slow fan mode which reduces the noise to a reasonable level.

The calibration of the touchscreen seems to be a bit off and I haven't found a tool to correct it (under Windows).

Everything is good. It’s a great laptop that doesn’t have a good battery life and a 2 in one laptop+heater. It does test you and I guess that’s a good thing. And also I can’t forget the ONE MONTH delay, tested my patience so much. All aside, the laptop is amazing, I would prefer this more than other laptops. Just the screen isn’t that good, which it was oled and curve edges. The bezel is incredibly wide. The tablet mode isn’t quite tablet mode.
All the ports are GREAT. Amazing. Support services are amazing. At first yes, not very friendly and sounds VERY SARCASTIC. Well in my opinion. Nevertheless, amazing. Recommend, or maybe not.

Very impressed with the 8” laptop and works perfect for my needs working out of a truck and on the go. The keyboard is easy to type with and the small screen actually works better than expected. Was worried an 8.8” screen would be too small. If I can get 5 yrs out of this It will have exceeded my expectations.

Great device overall! This little laptop is a utilitarian gamer/dev's dream. The chassis is solid aluminum and makes it way a LOT for its size, but considering how feature-rich and sturdy the whole thing feels it's definitely warranted.

Aside from that, I do have some minor gripes. The chassis, buttons, AND screen are all grease magnets. It's the most ideal size for an in-field carry, but hopefully your adventures take you into AC or else you'll have fingerprints all over the cover in seconds. If you have naturally oily hands, then good luck. After mild keyboard use over a week (I often hook it up to an external setup when gaming), I already have the plastic on my space bar that shiny, worn-in, sheen black, along with other common keys like shift. I think it'd be great to put a case or a wrap on it, if you can manage.

Another annoyance is the screen and body's seal. The smooth and slippery metal makes it really tough to get a good grip to open the lid. There's a minor indent, but it's too small to use unless you're using your nail. Issue is, the border for the screen is incredibly small and as far as I've seen, there's no screen protector other than the temporary plastic to protect it in shipping. I elected to keep it and peel off the white "Remove" tab to protect the screen, but the material doesn't seem like it'll hold up over time.

Final problem, which bugs me the most, is the crashes. I admittedly haven't done much troubleshooting (Only had it for a week), but the laptop will suddenly hang and restart if I do things in an "unpredicted(?)" order, like flipping through a menu while it's actively resizing, or changing too many graphics settings at once, or even just unplugging it while a game is running. I'm sure it's a solvable issue, and I genuinely can't tell if it's something I'd done when first using it or if it was something that's wrong with the hardware.

Other than those gripes, the whole thing is a really good package! I got the lowest spec model and I can run pretty much anything excluding modern AAA games. Plenty of flexibility and good build quality!

I will start by saying that for a such a tiny device the whole thing feels more like a quality laptop than a "toy" that you may expect. This is a serious piece of kit (as it should be at the price!) for getting work done.
The keyboard is very nice, compared to a Macbook Pro, it is like-for-like typing feel if a little constrained by the size which is to be expected.
Performance is exceptional, in fact, I am replacing my desktop Windows PC with it. The built in GPU seems up to the task - I would just say switch off things like FPS counters and benchmarking and just enjoy some games without worrying how many frames per second you are getting - it all feels fine which is the most important thing, many titles that are recent additions to Gamepass work flawlessly on it and you always have that USB 4 port if you want to explore using an eGPU later down the line.
As for the one annoyance, it's the screen, it is lovely to look at BUT they appear to have done something odd with the rotation, in all but Windows the screen is incorrectly rotated. I think they may have used a portrait orientated panel, as it is always 90 degrees counter clockwise rotated outside Windows. It can be corrected with settings, but makes it very hard to navigate things like GRUB bootloaders or the desktop until it is done via commands.