Palmtop 2024

Sep 29, 2024 palmtop netbook hardware laptop

You remember NetBooks, right? Are they making a comeback? I dunno, but they do seem to exist again - at last!

Back in February I made the mistake of browsing AliExpress for something and a tiny laptop caught my eye.

The original advert has long since been repurposed to some other machine, but it was similar to this one:

The full title was this fine mess:

A7 Intel J4115 Mini Pocket Laptop 7 Inch Touch Screen 12GB DDR4 Max2TB Portable Notebook HD Camera Windows 10/11

With a subtitle of:

CHINA, 12GB NO SSD NO OS, Intel Celeron J4115, UK

All that a snip at 2846.41 SEK or around $280 - though it would have been a smidgeon more as the buying power of Kronor has gone up a bit since then. I’ve been wanting a very light device that’s a full computer for travel purposes for a while now, and we had a very imminent trip to the US… tempting.

Caveats ahead of time…

I’m a bit suspicious of out-of-EU vendors at the best of times, and I’d not bought anything from AliExpress before. While this device wasn’t that cheap, it was cheap enough that I was willing to take the risk. Aside from the risk of getting a box of sand or something or just nothing ever delivered, I was aware that there was the possibility that the device would be garbage, or so underpowered that it wasn’t useful to me, or that Linux wouldn’t support enough of the hardware for it to be useful.

In the end (but see the “Annoyances” section) I don’t regret the purchase.

Annoyances

So how did it work out in the end? In short - it had one big annoyance and a few smaller ones but mostly seems pretty good! Here are those annoyances from largest to smallest:

A broken m2 connector

This is definitely the worst part. I bought the 12G version of the palmtop but with no SSD fitted. When it arrived it turned out that there’s a fault on the connector so it’s physically impossible to insert an SSD (yes, of the right type, no I wasn’t trying to just ignore the keying on the connector). Shaving half a millimetre from the notch on the keying slot allowed it to be inserted, but then the pins didn’t align and the SSD wasn’t available.

I did verify that I could boot the gadget off of a USB stick or a micro-SD card so it wasn’t completely useless, but this was a big enough deal that after verifying I could run Linux (Ubuntu) on it ok I just put it in a drawer and left it for most of the year. My faith in any possible returns process was non-existent but I suppose it might have been ok.

If you get a similar device, best to get it with at least a small amount of storage so that you stand a better chance of having this work out of the box.

Permafan

The fan is not under CPU control and is a little loud. It works very well, but it’s on whenever the device is running. One of several weird corners to cut - the palmtop is perfectly capable of reporting the CPU temperature so active control would have been easily possible for a few more cents construction cost; are their margins really that slender?

I may try just unplugging it and see how it runs without any fan. I’m not convinced it’s making a big difference!

Mousekeys

The mouse buttons aren’t received as “real” mouse events. They’re received as “mousekeys” keyboard events - basically as if one were pressing keys on the right hand number pad of a full size keyboard. Apparently this is a thing that’s sometimes useful for accessibility. This makes it extra hard to set the device up initially because you basically can’t click on anything until you’ve enabled the corresponding accessibility feature.

You can do this by careful combinations of tab, arrow keys, and the enter key - but I don’t recommend it. Plug a USB mouse in and use that to enable the feature. Here’s the menu option for it in the Ubuntu settings app:

What’s a lot more annoying is that you don’t seem to be able to do click-drag combinations with mousekeys. I’ve not yet discovered a workaround for this so for any serious use with the mouse you’re still going to need something external.

Rotated screen

When you boot the device the Intel BIOS splashscreen is correctly oriented - but as soon as you’re in grub or anything else using the basic EFI framebuffer it becomes obvious that the screen is really a tablet screen designed to be used at a 90° angle to how it’s attached to the palmtop. Everything is rotated.

Any Operating System worth its salt (and Ubuntu is no exception) can rotate the screen back for you once it’s running - but it does make it a nuisance to get things installed initially. Here’s the screen in settings where you override that:

Even after correcting for that, it’s slightly disappointing that the Grub boot splash screen (Ubuntu logo and spinner) or boot selection menu are rotated. Also if you like to use virtual TTYs (Ctrl-Alt-F3 etc.) they’ll be rotated too.

Searching around it seems like you should be able to set some grub commands to override the boot splash and virtual TTYs (e.g. fbcon=rotate:1 or GRUB_FB_ROTATION) but none of that seemed to work for me and it doesn’t really affect anything other than the aesthetic at boot time (I don’t use virtual TTYs in practice)

Pleasant surprises

When I first tried to set up the device under Ubuntu early this year there were some additional hardware issues:

• The audio system didn’t work
• A touch screen was reported by lspci but didn’t work

Installing the latest version of Ubuntu much later in the year with a newer kernel both of these issues have vanished! I didn’t even realise the touch screen was working until I used a cloth to clean grease off the screen and things started activating! No problems with the audio now either.

At least when it’s new the battery lasts pretty well - much longer than my “real” Linux laptop (a Dell) at the moment (though obviously not in the league of Macs which always do well on that metric). That’s probably more important on a device like this that I might choose to take on a long flight than it would be for my main machine that I mostly just use around the house.

The screen is quite acceptable (albeit small) and while the machine is not powerful it is good enough to watch a movie - which is likely the most taxing thing I’ll demand of it.

Specification

So, the spec is roughly:

• 12GB RAM
• Intel Celeron J4115 CPU
• Trackpoint-like “mouse”
• Mouse buttons (but in mousekeys mode)
• PCI slot (broken on mine)
• Micro SD card slot (works fine with a 512G card but it’s fairly slow)
• 2 USB-A ports
• WiFi
• Bluetooth
• Camera (very potato but it works)
• 1280x800 pixel touch screen

Here it is running Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS and reporting what’s what:

As you can see, the Celeron J4115 CPU offers 4 cores. It can run from 1.8GHz to 2.5GHz for burst loads. It’s practical for watching movies under VLC and while things were slow I think that was more due to my being forced to have the OS installed on an SD card (with the resulting slow IO) rather than it being a CPU problem. Full CPU specs are available from Intel’s website.

Here’s the lspci output (if you squint a bit) for the full hardware details as seen on the PCI bus:

I’ll update that with a proper text view of the same at some point soon - away from gadget right now and I didn’t think to capture it when prepping for this post!

This is a perfectly fine machine for light coding and as a travel device that’s more capable than my phone but substantially lighter and more compact than my real laptop.

Getting up and running

I had a brief go at setting the device up just after I bought it, but then hit the problem with the m2 connector and so never did use it for the trip shortly after. Eight months later, after a trip where it would have been nice to have at hand, I decided to get it up and running properly - I bought a 512G SSD card to be the OS disk and installed from a USB thumb drive. The installation experience was quite smooth (using an external keyboard, mouse, and monitor to avoid the annoyances of setup before the mousekeys & screen rotation were addressed).

It feels underpowered. I assume some of that for me is the fact that everything is running from an SD card instead of an SSD. I wouldn’t want to use the keyboard for very long as it’s so cramped - but it’s perfectly useable.

Having mousekeys instead of real mouse events seems like such a strange corner to cut. I guess it was easier to hang them off the same logic as the other keys, but with it already needing to get the mouse events from the trackpoint surely there was a better way?

The unboxing experience

I must say, for something that I thought might not turn up at all I’m fairly impressed with what I got. In fact even before getting started setting things up I was quite impressed by the packaging and presentation; here’s how it arrived.

Firstly a decent thick padded bubblewrap envelope…

…then a sturdy cardboard box. The finish was actually a bit nicer than it looks in this photo where poor light and a phone camera don’t make the best of it…

…card, plastic, and foam inserts made for a well protected inner cell - even a thin plastic wrapper to preserve the case from any smudges…

…and removing the laptop itself reveals the rest of the contents - “user manual” which is a laughable single printed sheet in very bad English (forgiveable but also pointless) and a very light cheap feeling 12V power adapter. The adapter, along with its narrow tight-fitting and fragile-feeling barrel plug is probably the worst bit of the laptop but hasn’t failed or set my house on fire so far. Here it is in all its glory:

Then removed from its sleeve the laptop’s aluminium case is nice - that looks like a scratch but it’s not; I think it’s a stray cat hair or something like that as anything entering our flat immediately gets exposed to them! Also I think there was still a protective plastic film on the laptop at this point.

Opened up it looks suspiciously (but presumably not actionably) like a Thinkpad with the trackpoint - although the weird keyboard layout rather gives it away that it’s not.

So that the lot. It’s not quite up there with the sort of unboxing experience Apple gives you - and a far cry from the days of the 2006 Macbook that was the single most beautifully packaged thing I’ve ever bought - but it was a much fancier apprach than I expected at the price point.

BIOS and features

Under the cover

Or uboxing extreme if you like :)

I’ve seen some reviews of similar laptops online but with slightly different processors - I definitely needed to remove the lid to get a look at the inner hardware. It all unscrews very simply (with an appropriate torx screwdriver head) but they hide one of the screws under a shiny sticker presumably to discourage this…

The heatsink is reassuringly chonky… I’m definitely tempted to unplug that fan permanently…

Here’s what it looks like with the fan removed - and you can see the SSD card plugged in as at this point I’d not completely given up on getting that to work. Oh and the fan’s unplugged - I verified that everything would boot up and run without it in case I do decide to permanently unplug it in the future (or I might wire it to a switch hidden behind the SSD access panel as that’s of no other use to me without a working SSD).

Some of the other (different intel processor) machines like this have a functional USB-C connector on the motherboard that’s not exposed by the case - mine has what looks like solder points to attach one, but no actual connector in place there. I probably won’t try soldering one on though as the other laptops didn’t allow for the laptop to be charged from this port (likely the only thing I’d particularly want it for given the crappy power adapter).

Finally here’s another view of that noisy fan:

All in all - not bad.

Conclusion

If you want a light and compact laptop for travel, don’t need high performance and don’t mind a few cut corners then getting one of these devices might work well for you.

The corner cutting seems a shame and I suspect they might have found an enthusiastic market for this device if they’d not done so - and if it were available with Ubuntu or something similar instead of Windows (which I hear struggles on such underpowered devices).