The Trimui Smart is a pretty unusual early handheld. Unlike the big “shanzhai” makers who lean on the open-source community to supply a “usable system,” Trimui has always built its own custom system, and it actually works well. Most people know the later Trimui Smart Pro, the handheld that claims it can play PSP — though not comfortably — and whose real selling point is killer standby time (the perk of a custom system is deep optimization), plus the Trimui Brick that carried on the Smart Pro’s traits, and so on… I’ve actually used both the Trimui Smart Pro and the Trimui Brick, and sold them later. Not because the system was bad — mainly because the build quality was so poor. Burrs everywhere, and the buttons are stiff as hell… But today we’re not talking about those two. We’re talking about the Trimui Smart, the first product in the line.

Preface Maybe you get old and start getting nostalgic. Lately everything new feels boring to me, and I’ve been missing the past. So I got the urge to build an “old computer” — install Win98, WinXP, or even Windows 7 on something. The Win9X and XP eras seemed like a hassle, so I decided to start with Win7. The other reason I went with Win7 is that I spotted a batch of cheap new-old-stock laptops on eBay: the Dell Latitude 3340, the first generation, the Haswell one. Stock config is 4GB RAM and a 500GB HDD, and the key point is “brand new old stock” — compared with those ThinkPads that have been flipped who-knows-how-many times, that’s one advantage. After some research I found this thing drives Windows 7 perfectly. Even the weird Intel integrated HD4600 can utterly demolish retro games from the Windows 7 era, so it’s a solid choice for revisiting stuff from around 2010. With that beautiful fantasy in mind, I bought this new-old-stock machine.