A batch of HP docks showed up on eBay recently for 69 yuan with free shipping. Full name: Elite X3 Lapdock. It was originally made to pair with HP’s own Windows Phone handsets, but thanks to the well-known reasons, the Windows Phone market is completely dead, and this thing is now an awkward orphan nobody wants. Like most people, I had fantasies about it too. Could this be a cheap TNT Go? So I grabbed one to find out.

I’ve been playing Galgames again lately, so I started looking for a new device. The reason I didn’t just keep using the Rog Ally X handheld is mainly that it’s inconvenient for slacking off — one look and it’s obviously a game console, way too conspicuous. So I started shopping around. My budget is really limited, so I unexpectedly found that a batch of these has recently shown up on the secondhand market: the Lenovo Kaitian D10. Plenty are advertised as being in great condition, but I figure they were probably recycled from somewhere too.

Years back, Cube put out an 8-inch tablet called the Palm Play Mini. The whole point was that it was dirt cheap, and it took a SIM card. Only 4GB of RAM, weak CPU, but cheap. At a price that low, every other flaw stops mattering. Then the product started listening to users. “Upgrade X and I’ll buy one,” they said, so it upgraded, and upgraded, and upgraded. Fewer people bought it, the price climbed, and the series felt like it was on its deathbed. Cube’s He Mengnan disappeared from view, and the thing lost its entire selling point. So I’m scrolling Pinduoduo and see a tablet, brand new, 350-odd yuan shipped. It arrives and the box says “Suishengting” — sealed, never opened. But apart from the brand name, the specs and a few details told me everything: this is Cube’s 8-inch Palm Play Mini.

I think I bought this tablet around November 2024, from everyone’s favorite OK shop. The reason was simple: I wanted a tablet, and the only goal was watching videos. Ideally stock Android, able to install GMS, and not a Chinese brand… The price at OK at the time was hard to refuse — a bit over 300, under 400, and the condition was decent, so I grabbed it.

Back in May last year, I noticed the ROG Ally X handheld was not only in stock on JD.com, but the price was back to normal, and it even qualified for the national subsidy. Basically, a machine that originally cost over 6000 RMB ended up discounted by a little over 1000, so I got it for under 5000. The reason JD.com gives you is the “national subsidy,” but in reality you don’t need to bind any qualification for this subsidy—you just need your delivery address to be in Shanghai. A victory for the “Shanghai lords,” you could say. Naturally, I asked a fellow townsman bigshot in Shanghai to receive and buy it for me, and successfully got my hands on this handheld. A lot of people probably want to know: I’m a SteamDeck shill, so why did I buy ASUS’s handheld? How should you choose between it and the SteamDeck? I think I can explain it briefly with these points: It’s a Windows handheld, so it can play Windows-exclusive games (Galgame) It’s the only Windows handheld I know of that’s continuously optimizing power efficiency It’s the best Windows handheld I know of when it comes to self-made power control software At the time (2025), it had the largest battery capacity among Windows handhelds Some might bring up the ROG Ally + big battery mod, which has basically the same performance, but the biggest difference with the ROG Ally X is its 24GB of native RAM. The change that big memory brings is that you can allocate a large amount of VRAM to games, especially those poorly optimized ones that all need lots of VRAM. And from my observation, the root cause of stuttering when the SteamDeck runs those badly optimized games is often insufficient memory, and the ROG Ally X can clearly improve that.

As a longtime ThinkPad user, I’d always stuck with the X1 Carbon series, and I’d always felt the Carbon deserved its flagship status. But as time went on and the nature of my work changed, my demands for performance kept climbing. The thing is, the X1 Carbon is fundamentally a thin-and-light, so its performance ceiling is very limited — and, absurdly, the battery capacity isn’t great either. That eternal 57Wh (I hear they bumped it to 58Wh in 2026) means that aside from being light and thin, both battery life and performance are pretty mediocre. It just wasn’t meeting my needs anymore. So after watching and waiting for nearly a year, I finally saw off the absurd MTL architecture and welcomed the TSMC-powered ARL-H. I picked up the ThinkPad T14p Gen 3 with integrated graphics — the so-called “China-exclusive pocket rocket” — in the U285H + 6400 high-frequency DDR5 64G memory configuration. I ran the numbers and buying the RAM myself would actually cost more than paying the upgrade premium, so I just went all the way. I’ve been using the machine for nearly a year now. Feels like if I don’t say something soon, Panther Lake will be out. So let me just jot down some impressions here.

Last time I mentioned I bought an RK3588 laptop. It used a no-name OEM chassis, but the overall experience still beat my expectations. I also mentioned that the laptop had a few shortcomings, and fixing them would be a huge improvement: Fast typing on the keyboard causes double presses (probably a chassis issue) Battery capacity isn’t big enough Build quality is a bit poor, the whole body is plastic Only one USB-A port Too much empty space inside So is there an RK3588 laptop that solves all those pain points? Yes, there is, my friend, there absolutely is.

Around May last year I was thinking about replacing the laptop I’d been using for over three years. Unfortunately, the only new stuff out at the time was either a Ryzen 7840HS with mediocre Linux support, or the new Intel Meteor Lake ThinkPads. Even though going from an 11th-gen chip to Meteor Lake would have been a big jump, Meteor Lake barely improved over the previous generation — it even regressed in places — so I decided to wait it out. While waiting, I stumbled onto this “Chinese-made laptop,” the Cool-Pi CM5 Laptop. ARM architecture, RK3588, native Linux support, 32GB of RAM, hard drive expansion, and interest-free installments on the Tmall store. I thought about it and figured I’d play with it for a bit. Ended up buying one.

Last year, I think, Qingzhou Xiaoxiong—the online seller most respectful of electronic waste—listed a batch of e-ink devices: the first-generation Remarkable, at a very lovely price, probably under 600 yuan, brand new. I got excited and grabbed one, and I’ve been using it on and off as a reading and e-paper device ever since. Here are some quick thoughts.

I’ve lost count of how many “retro handhelds” I’ve bought, but this one grabbed me hard, purely because of how it looks. Anbernic markets it as a “fighting handheld” built for FTG, but the button layout is obviously lifted from the SEGA Saturn pad. Which means it’s not just good for fighting games — it’s better suited to SEGA MD and Saturn titles. That’s the idea, anyway. Reality is another matter. When this thing launched, they pulled a sneaky one and split it into two versions: the single-OS ARC-S and the dual-OS ARC-D. Generally the whole “Linux and Android dual system” thing on these handhelds is pointless, but of course this one used it as a sales gimmick. The retro colorway everyone wants is exclusive to the dual-OS model, while the single-OS one only comes in “translucent black” and “translucent white” — the colors that love to crack. And the dual-OS version costs more, so players like me end up paying extra for a dual-boot setup we’ll never use, just to get the color we want. And in practice, this machine has way more problems than I expected.