Your hands-on guide to portable tech
We ordered the cheapest handheld PC Amazon would ship to an American doorstep and made it our daily driver for seven days. Here's everything it could do, everything it couldn't, and whether fifty bucks buys a real computer or a very slow paperweight.
Right-to-repair laws are hitting the books in states like Minnesota, California, and New York — but do they cover the handhelds and pocket PCs we cover every day? We dug into the fine print to find out what's changing, what isn't, and what to demand next.
We tested five different handheld PC configurations on actual American commutes — packed subway cars, bumpy buses, and everything in between. Here's what works when your office is a standing-room-only car on the Red Line.
I ditched my laptop and desktop for a full week and let a pocket PC handle everything from airport layovers to late-night gaming sessions. Some of it surprised me. Some of it nearly broke me.
There's no single right way to carry a pocket computer, so we asked six very different Americans how they do it. A traveling nurse, a road-warrior sales rep, and four others share the cases, hubs, and habits that make their tiny PCs work.
A grand is a lot of money for a gaming handheld, so we measured exactly what it buys: display lux, speaker output, build tolerances, and frame rates. Some of it is worth every penny. Some of it is pure marketing theater.
Thermal throttling in handheld gaming PCs isn't a bug or a bad batch — it's physics doing exactly what physics does. We ran real-world tests, pulled thermal imaging data, and talked to engineers to explain why your device always seems to hit its wall at the worst possible moment.
Your pocket-sized PC is packing more raw compute than machines that once filled entire rooms — yet somehow it still feels like it's holding you back. That gap between raw capability and perceived satisfaction isn't a hardware problem. It's a human one.
The sticker price on a new handheld is just the beginning. When you switch ecosystems — Windows to Linux, iPad to Android, or anywhere in between — there's a whole second invoice waiting that nobody puts in the box. We broke down what that actually looks like in dollars and hours.
Keeping thirty-plus apps open in the background feels like being productive. Your device's processor has a different word for it. Understanding what's actually happening under the hood when you refuse to close anything might be the single most effective performance upgrade you never thought to make.
Foldable phones look incredible in ads and feel futuristic in your hand — for about the first week. But after the novelty fades, the lint, the creases, and the hinge anxiety start asking some pretty uncomfortable questions about whether you actually got your money's worth.
Every millimeter shaved off your device's profile comes at a cost most manufacturers hope you never think about — and that cost is usually paid the moment something breaks. We talked to the people fixing these devices every day to find out how bad it's actually gotten.
Thermal throttling is the dirty secret hiding inside almost every handheld PC on the market. We ran sustained stress tests across eight current-generation devices to find out which cooling solutions actually deliver, which ones are mostly marketing, and what you can do to keep your own device running at full speed.
Conventional wisdom says bigger screens equal better productivity. But a growing number of remote workers and developers are discovering that shrinking their workspace actually sharpens their focus in ways a 27-inch monitor never could. Here's the counterintuitive case for going small.
Something is shifting in the gaming world, and it goes way beyond casual players picking up a Steam Deck for the couch. A growing number of serious gamers are walking away from their PlayStation 5s and Xbox Series X consoles entirely, replacing them with handheld PCs — and the reasons why are more compelling than you might expect.
Repair shops are thriving, third-party developers are breathing new life into aging pocket computers, and manufacturers are quietly fuming about it. The portable computing renaissance didn't just bring back powerful handhelds — it may have accidentally broken the upgrade cycle that keeps the industry's lights on.
Active battery life gets all the attention in reviews, but the real story of how long your portable device actually lasts plays out during the hours it spends in your bag or on your nightstand. We investigated the standby drain problem — what causes it, which devices handle it well, and what you can actually do about it.
You can have the fastest chip on the market under the hood, but if your buttons feel mushy or imprecise, your handheld experience falls apart fast. We put mechanical and capacitive input methods head to head across several popular devices to find out why identical hardware can feel completely different depending on what's under your thumbs.
Your flagship handheld has 16GB of RAM and a chip that benchmarks faster than a laptop from two years ago — so why does it stutter, freeze, and choke the moment things get serious? The answer isn't RAM. It's a combination of thermal throttling, storage bottlenecks, and process management that manufacturers rarely talk about.
That '18-hour battery life' claim on the box? It was tested under conditions you'll never actually replicate. We break down exactly how manufacturers engineer those numbers, walk you through the hidden variables that eat your charge, and give you a practical method for calculating what your device will actually last in the real world.