If you have a soft spot for highly portable computers that can be utilised for gaming then you might have been interested by recent articles about devices from lesser known brands like GPD, OneNetbook, and others. Now it looks like there's a chance of a heavyweight PC systems maker coming to the field with an attractive proposition.
Promotional materials for the Lavie Mini 8-inch touchscreen laptop have become available ahead of CES 2021. This is a collaborative prototype from the R&D teams at NEC and Lenovo. It promises some of the best modern PC tech in a highly compact and portable form factor and its development might send a shiver down the spine of its lesser known rival brands.
Already you will have pondered over the pictures of the Lavie Mini above and below. These give you a very good idea of the proposition and some are predictably calling the device a PC-Nintendo Switch challenger. Any wide screen compact device flanked by games controller attachments is headlined this way nowadays. However, there is another Switch-alike mechanism here; the Lavie Mini has been shown off with a TV connecting stand/dock (see below). I've chewed the fat long enough about outward appearances now, so below please find below an easy to check bullet pointed specs list:
Lavie Mini tech specs:
- Screen: 8-inch touch screen of 1920 x 1200 pixels
- CPU: 11th Gen Intel Core i7 processor
- GPU: on-die Intel Iris Xe graphics
- RAM: 16GB LPDDR4x 4,266MHz
- Storage: 256GB M.2 SSD
- Battery: Long life 26Wh battery
- Ports: includes two USB 3.1 Type-C ports
- Input: built in keyboard with circular keycaps and a triple row of utility keys about the QWERTY block, optical touch sensor cursor control in the space bar
- System weight (not including dock or controller): 579g
- Quick Charge Dock: includes HDMI for 4K60 TV output, and USB ports
- Controller: Twin analogue joysticks, D-pad and several other keys/buttons.
The Lavie Mini has quite detailed specs for a prototype, and there are some other Lavie branded devices going to be released in the coming weeks so it would be reasonable to be hopeful that this portable might actually become a shipping product in the not-too-distant future.
