If you are bored with thin black rectangular smartphones and clamshell laptops, then the Higole PC should tweak your interest. It’s a pocket PC. You read that right. The Gole Higole PC 2022 is an entire desktop PC and it fits in your pocket.
Microsoft attempted the pocket PC back in the Windows XP era and it failed miserably. Of course, that was long before everyone on the planet carried a smartphone. But Microsoft never tried again. Chinese company Gole, based in Shenzhen, is taking a swing at it in 2022.
This pocket PC is available in a couple of flavors. The top-tier versions use an Intel Celeron J4125 with four cores and 2.7 GHz boost, while a cheaper model uses a discontinued Celeron N4000 chip. There must have been some excess stock laying around.
The unit comes with 8 GB of LPDDR4X RAM and an integrated Intel UHD 600 GPU. Not bad for such a small device. With the two full HDMI 2.0 ports on the side, you could use it with two 4K monitors. There are four USB-A ports, a single USB-C port (for power only), an Ethernet port, and a microSD slot.
It packs a 5.5-inch 1280x800p touchscreen display into a boxy 5.6-inch-tall case. It’s only 0.7 inches thick, and Gole says this is the smallest and lightest PC ever built.
Of course, this isn’t a gaming handheld. It’s more of a productivity machine. You can answer emails, take notes, and make appointments with it. Gole calls it an “all-in-one mini PC to meet a variety of life needs.” While you can use the touchscreen display for on-the-go tasks, Gole appears to consider this more of a docked machine. This pocket PC seems designed to be used with monitors. It gives people the ability to carry their computer around with them, much like a laptop without the bulk.
The Higole PC is being crowdfunded on Indiegogo. They had a goal of $3,000 and have surpassed $18,000 in funding as of this writing. The base model is listed at $200 and the high-end model is $295, with a planned release in September 2022.
