The GPD Duo is a dual-screen laptop that sometimes feels like the Swiss Army Knife of mobile computers. It has a robust set of ports that includes USB4, OCuLink, and 2.5 Gb Ethernet. It’s available with up to an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 Strix Point processor and 64GB of RAM. And it has two 2.8K OLED touchscreen displays and a built-in keyboard.

That’s something that sets the GPD Duo apart from some other so-called dual screen laptops like the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i and Asus Zenbook Duo, both of which are really more like dual-screen tablets with detachable keyboards that can be position atop one screen.

After having used the GPD DUO as my primary computer for the past few months, I can truly say that not only does this computer feel more like a laptop than a tablet, but it might be one of the best laptops I’ve ever used… at least for the way I work. Unfortunately it’s a difficult computer to recommend.

Why you might not want one

There are a few reasons for that. One is that this is an expensive notebook. Prices started at $1270 when the GPD Duo went up for pre-order through a crowdfunding campaign in October, 2024. Prices are even higher now that the computer is available through retail channels. As of mid-January, 2025 it’s available from DroiX, Amazon, and AliExpress – but prices are considerably higher.

A second reason is that this is honestly more laptop than many people will ever need. I personally don’t have any hardware that supports the OCuLink or 2.5 GbE LAN ports. So while I’m not complaining about the inclusion of those features, I suspect that many customers interested in this notebook for its dual screens, high-performance processor, or other components might also end up paying a premium for one or more features they don’t need.

But there are two much bigger reasons that I have a hard time recommending the GPD Duo. One is that GPD is a relatively small company that makes computers for niche markets… and the GPD Duo might be the most niche product GPD has made to date. In fact, demand has been so low that the company says it currently has no plans to produce any more units. So you can’t buy one from GPD anymore, and the only way to get your hands on one is to make a purchase from one of the retailers mentioned above.

The other is that GPD is a company that has a less than stellar reputation for providing customer service and support for its products. It’s not like you won’t get any support, but you definitely shouldn’t expect the same level of service you’d get from a larger company with a bigger presence outside of China.

GPD has made some of the most innovative computers I’ve seen in the past decade. Long before the Steam Deck and other handheld gaming PCs hit the streets, there was the GPD Win. At a time when no other major companies were offering mini-laptops with 7 inch screens, there was the GPD Pocket. And the company has continued to think outside of the box with devices like the GPD MicroPC for IT professionals and GPD Win 4 handheld gaming PC with a slide-out keyboard.

But GPD has also had quality control issues – a few years ago the company shipped some GPD Win 3 units with the wrong wireless adapter and then bungled its response to the issue by leaking the email addresses of customers. And Reddit is filled with stories from people who have had difficulty getting GPD to provide repairs for faulty hardware or who have had managed to get service, but have had to pay to ship their hardware to China and wait a long time for repaired hardware to be returned.

When it comes to the GPD Duo, the company initially shipped its dual-screen laptop with some software bugs that, for example, caused screen tearing issues on the primary display when you disabled the second screen. GPD has since released a software update that resolves this issue. But it’s unclear how many more updates users can expect from GPD, and there are still some unresolved bugs.

Why I kind of love it anyway

With those caveats out of the way though, the GPD Duo is a remarkable laptop that has changed the way I think about mobile computing, and I hope we see more devices using this form factor in the future. As a general purpose laptop it’s got a powerful processor, decent build quality, and an okay computer. But that second screen puts it in a unique category: it takes up little more space in your bag than a single-screen notebook, but gives you twice as much screen space, allowing you to view multiple applications at once without any compromises.

GPD sent me a demo unit that I’ve been testing for this review and when I first opened the laptop… and then lifted the second screen, the setup seemed so ridiculous that I literally laughed out loud. But after using the dual-screen laptop for just a few minutes, I found myself wondering why there aren’t more laptops with this type of design.

I’ve been writing about small computers since 2007, and I’ve been enthusiastically been using portable computing devices for longer than that – I wrote most of my master’s thesis sitting in a coffee shop with a PDA plugged into a portable keyboard. But when I’m working in my home office, I typically prefer a multi-display setup: I have an ultrawide (27 inch, 2560 x 1080 pixel) monitor that’s sort of like having two 1280 x 1080 pixel displays side-by side. And it’s usually plugged into a laptop, which functions as a third screen.

When I’m working on the go, I usually have to make do with just one screen, which either means I have to squeeze one or more apps into smaller windows than I’d like, or I have to toggle back and forth between multiple apps instead of seeing them all at once.

That’s not a problem with a dual-screen laptop like the GPD Duo. A few months ago I took this laptop with me when visiting family out of state, and my mobile work setup felt remarkably similar to my home setup, even though I left my widescreen monitor at home.

When I needed to hop on Zoom calls for work, I could put the Zoom window on one screen while taking notes and referring to research materials on the other. When editing a podcast I was able to have my audio editing software on one screen and a text transcript on another. And when writing articles for this website, I was able to view multiple browser windows by putting two windows in one screen (for research) and a third on the other screen (for writing).

Basically this dual-screen laptop gives you the versatility of multiple displays without the need to carry a portable monitor that needs its own power source, kickstand, or carrying case. I thought it would take a while to get used to looking up and down to shift my gaze from one screen to the other, but it actually only took seconds – you can shift your eyes up or down without even moving your neck, so it might actually make more sense to stack screens vertically than it does to position them side-by-side.

And since the second screen is attached to the first with a 360 degree hinge, you don’t have to use the laptop with one screen above the other. You can also flip the screens so they’re back to back and turn off the second screen to use the GPD Duo like a single-screen notebook. Or you can mirror your primary display to the second screen so a person sitting across from you can see what you’re looking at.

And you can fold the screens flat so that they cover the keyboard with one screen facing up, allowing you to use the notebook like a tablet. I didn’t spend a lot of time using the computer this way because the pre-release model I received had an older version of the UEFI/BIOS firmware which sometimes caused the top screen to fail to recognize touch input, making tablet usage difficult. But that issue should be resolved for retail units.

The GPD Duo is a little thicker and heavier than most laptops I’ve used in recent years, measuring 23.8mm (0.94″) thick and weighing 2.2kg (4.85 pounds). But it’s still more compact than most recent gaming laptops, has a sturdy all-metal body, and GPD uses that space not only to pack two screens into one laptop, but also a reasonably large 80 Wh battery as well as a cooling system that includes dual fans.

This clearly isn’t a laptop that will appeal to everyone: if you’re looking for the thinnest, lightest notebook with the longest battery life then this ain’t it. And if you’re unwilling to risk purchasing a laptop from a relatively small brand that has an imperfect track record for customer service and support, then I’d steer clear.

But if neither of those things turn of off, then there’s a lot to like about the GPD Duo.

GPD provided Liliputing with a pre-production model for purposes of this review. This review is not sponsored by GPD, and the company did not modify or approve the content of this article in any way.

Specs

The demo unit GPD sent me features an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 “Strix Point” 12-core, 24-thread processor with Radeon 890M integrated graphics, 64GB of LPDDR5x-7500 memory, and a 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD divided into two partitions: one with about 768GB of usable space and another with about 256GB.

The company also offers lower-cost models with an AMD Ryzen 7 8840U “Hawk Point” processor and a higher-priced configuration that ships with 2TB of storage.

While the storage is user-replaceable and upgradeable across all models (there are two accessible M.2 2280 slots), the memory is soldered to the mainboard is cannot be upgraded. Fortunately even the cheapest models now come with at least 32GB of memory.

Here’s an overview of key specs for the models that are available for purchase at time of publication:

Design

When you first take it out of the box, the GPD Duo looks a bit like a throwback to earlier days of laptop computers. Measuring nearly an inch thick and featuring a full-sized Ethernet port and HDMI port on the back, it’d be easy to mistake for a single-screen notebook with a sturdy aluminum body that measures nearly an inch thick.

But when you lift the lid, instead of seeing a display, you’ll see the back of the laptop’s second screen.

You can either flip it 360 degrees so it’s behind the primary display to get started using the computer like a single-screen laptop or flip it 180 degrees so that it’s positioned above the primary display for use in dual-screen mode.

Both displays are 13.3 inch, 2880 x 1800 pixel AMOLED displays with a 60 Hz refresh rate and support for up to 500 nits peak brightness (or 400 nits typical brightness).

The upper display is effectively a portable monitor that’s permanently attached to the GPD Duo, so there are a few functions that can be a little quirky at times. For example, if you want to adjust the screen brightness for the lower display you can use the F1 and F2 keys on the keyboard. But to adjust the brightness of the upper display you’ll need to use the brightness buttons on the left side of the display. And if you want to disable the second screen you can do that by hitting the F3 key on the keyboard – but that will also disable connections to any external displays. So if you have an external monitor plugged into the computer’s HDMI or USB Type-C ports, hitting F3 will disable those screens as well.

Since the upper display is basically a portable monitor, you can actually use it as one: there’s a USB Type-C port above the brightness buttons that you can use as a video input. This lets you connect a laptop, phone, game console, or other gadgets.

This USB-C port only supports DisplayPort Alt Mode, so you can’t use it for data or charging. The display will still draw power from the laptop battery, but it springs to life as soon as you plug a compatible phone, laptop, or other device with a USB-C cable with support for DisplayPort Alt mode for video, allowing you to use the laptop’s built-in portable monitor as a second screen for other devices, and not just the laptop itself.

It took just a few seconds to connect the GPD Duo’s second screen to my HP Spectre x360 laptop (as seen in the image above), or my Google Pixel 8 Pro smartphone (as shown below). Both devices easily detected the display.

Windows treated the screen like any other external monitor, allowing me to mirror or extend my displays and adjust scaling, resolution, and other settings. Android allowed me to mirror my phone’s screen so that the home screen showed up on the GPD Duo display in portrait orientation, but the portable monitor automatically showed apps in landscape orientation when I rotated my phone to watch videos, browse web pages, or look at pictures in landscape mode. There were still some black bars above and below the screen in this mode, but less wasted space overall.

Fun fact: while there’s absolutely no reason to do this, you can run a USB cable from one of the USB Type-C ports on the left side of the computer to the USB Type-C input on the upper display. It will blink for a second and then switch to acting like a new monitor that had just been plugged in. So, for example, if Windows had been treating the upper display as an extended desktop, connecting it to the PC (again) via a USB-C cable will cause the upper screen to mirror the lower screen unless you go into the Windows display settings and configure it to do otherwise.

On my demo unit, the touchscreen on the upper display has a habit of going wonky. Sometimes it stops working after the laptop resumes from sleep. Sometimes when an external monitor is connected, taps and swipes to the upper screen register on the external monitor (for example, I can scroll through web pages on my external monitor by swiping up or down on the second screen, but I can’t scroll through web pages on that screen using touch).

But for the most part it’s easy to think of the second screen as a part of the laptop, because it really is. It powers on when you turn on the notebook (although it sometimes takes a moment longer to spring to life than the primary display). And it supports automatic screen rotation so it can detect which end is the “bottom” and which the “top” depending on whether it’s back-to-back with the primary screen or positioned above it.

While you might think that a dual-screen laptop would be top-heavy, GPD included a kickstand that folds out from the primary display to give you a little extra support when you need it. But I found that I rarely did – for the most part the GPD Duo does not feel like it’s going to flip over when both screens are extended unless you tilt both screens back far enough to upset the balance of the notebook.

For this reason, I was even able to use this dual-screen notebook while it was on my lap without worrying that it was going to tip over and without the kickstand digging into my legs. I won’t pretend that this is the most comfortable way to sit with a dual-screen notebook that weighs close to five pounds, and where the second screen comes close to eye height. But it’s possible to use this PC while it’s resting on your lap.

The GPD Duo has a no-nonsense physical design with a an all-black body and a somewhat boxy-looking design. The front corners of the notebook are rounded, but the sides are flat.

On the right side you’ll find a power button with an integrated fingerprint sensor (which was a bit less reliable than I would have liked, and which only works if you’re logged into Windows using a Microsoft account), and two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports.

On the left side there are two USB Type-C ports. One is a “full featured” USB4 port with support for 40 Gbps data transfer speeds, video output, and charging. The other is a USB 3.2 Gen 2 port which also supports video and power, but tops out at 10 Gbps data transfer speeds.

There’s also a full-sized SDXC 4.0 card reader and 3.5mm audio jack on the left. The system also has stereo speakers which are reasonably loud and clear. But like most laptop speakers, they don’t provide a lot of bass, which can make audio sound a little thin, especially when played at louder volumes.

GPD also made use of the back to add three more ports: an HDMI 2.1 output, a 2.5 Gb Ethernet port, and an OCuLink connector with support for 63 Gbps external PCIe connections to supported hardware like the GPD G1 external graphics dock.

On the bottom of the computer you’ll find a large vent, four rubber feet, and a set of 8 screws that you need to remove (along with two more screws on the back side of the computer) in order to open up the chassis and peek inside.

Under the hood you’ll find the laptop’s 80 Wh battery, dual fans and heat pipes, two M.2 2280 slots, and a wireless card (the system comes with support for WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 out of the box).

The laptop has a black island-style keyboard with single-color white backlit keys. The backlight is relatively dim. Sometimes I didn’t even notice it was on when using the laptop in a well-lit room. But it’s just bright enough to come in handy in dark or dimly lit environments by making the keys visible.

The Fn keys on the top row of the keyboard include shortcuts for controlling media playback, volume, screen brightness (for the lower screen only), and toggling the second screen on and off. There’s also a small white microphone icon above the keyboard, indicating the internal mic placement, and there’s a status LED light on the left side of the laptop to let you know when the system is powered on and/or charging.

GPD outfitted the primary display with slim bezels, but they’re not exactly uniform – the bottom bezel is thinner than the ones on the top or sides. There’s edge-to-edge glass covering the screen, but there’s also a section above the top bezel where the hinge connecting the primary and secondary screens is located. The computer’s 5MP webcam is also seated in this section.

Performance

GPD offers two processor options for the GPD Duo. One is the AMD Ryzen 7 8840U Hawk Point chip with 8 Zen 4 CPU cores, 16 threads, and 12 RDNA 2 GPU compute units. It’s a pretty good 15 – 30 watt processor that’s based on architecture that’s been around for a few years, and it even has an NPU that delivers up to 16 TOPS of on-device AI processing performance.

The model GPD shipped me has a newer, higher-performance Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 Strix Point chip that, until very recently, was one of the most powerful AMD laptop processors available. It’s a 15-54 watt chip with 12 cores (4 Zen 5 and 8 Zen 5c), 24 threads, 16 RDNA 3.5 GPU cores and a higher-performance 50 TOPS NPU.

So while the primary reason I jumped at the chance to review the GPD Duo was because I wanted to see how useful a dual-screen laptop could be, I was also interested in testing the performance of an AMD Strix Point processor to see how it performs.

The answer? The GPD Duo with a Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor is indeed one of the fastest computers I’ve ever used. But how much that matters will largely depend on what you’re using the computer for.

For the past few years I’ve been using an Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (GA402) gaming as my primary computer. While I don’t use it for gaming, it’s a notebook with a 14 inch, 2560 x 1440 pixel AMOLED display, an AMD Ryzen 9 6900HS processor, and Radeon RX 6700S discrete graphics, providing a good mix of performance, battery life, and ergonomics for my needs as a multimedia journalist who writes about tech, produces and edits audio podcasts, and facilitates production of community radio news programming.

And honestly, the Rog Zephyrus G14 has met or exceeded my expectations for the most part. It’s a 35-watt processor with 8 Zen 3 CPU cores, 16 threads, and 12 RDNA 2 GPU cores for integrated graphics as well as a discrete GPU that can kick in some extra power when needed.

But that’s a processors that’s a few years old at this point, so it’s not surprising that the GPD Duo with a Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor scores significantly higher in synthetic benchmarks including GeekBench, Passmark, and Cinebench.

In fact, this laptop performs better in those CPU-bound benchmarks than several recent mini desktop computers that Ian has tested, including the MINISFORUM UM890 Pro (with a Ryzen 9 8945HS Hawk Point processor) and GEEKOM GT1 Mega (with an Intel Core Ultra 9 185H Meteor Lake chip).

One area where my aging Asus gaming laptop still comes out way ahead is gaming benchmarks. It scores significantly higher in gaming tests like 3DMark’s Time Spy, Night Raid, and Fire Strike tests. But that’s not surprising since the ROG Zephyrus G14 has a discrete GPU. The GPD Duo, meanwhile, has one of the most powerful integrated GPUs available for laptops in 2024, and it does score higher than other systems in gaming and graphics benchmarks… just not enough higher to bring it into dGPU territory.

Synthetic benchmarks aren’t always indicative of real-world performance and, for the most part you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference between any of these machines for day-to-day activities like web surfing, document editing, or hopping on Zoom calls.

But I did complete a couple of major audio editing projects using the GPD Duo and found that the notebook was able to render complex, resource-intensive audio effects anywhere from 20 to 40 percent more quickly than my ROG Zephyrus G14.

That said, CPU horsepower is only one aspect of performance. When it comes to actually using the GPD Duo, here are a few other things to keep in mind.

One is that the laptop’s dual fans can get rather noisy at times, and they sometimes spin up under relatively light workloads, so you’ll almost certainly hear their high-pitch whirring noise from time to time.

Another is that battery life is decent, but not stellar. While the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 is a relatively energy-efficient processor that’s known for balancing strong performance and long battery life, the GPD Duo is a relatively power-hungry laptop: it takes a lot of juice to keep two AMOLED screens going. So it’s unsurprising that the GPD Duo isn’t going to win any awards for battery endurance.

Real-world battery life may vary greatly depending on the activity. I got 6 hours and 25 minutes of run time while streaming two 1080p videos from YouTube with one video playing on each screen.

While I wouldn’t ever expect all-day battery life from the GPD Duo, I found that I could expect at least 3-4 hours of battery life when using the notebook as a blogging machine, working with a dozen or more browser tabs open in two or three separate, windows while streaming music from Spotify and doing some light document editing.

If you’re worried about running out of battery power, the notebook comes with a reasonably compact 100W USB Type-C power adapter and should also be compatible with any power bank that supports 65W or higher USB Power Delivery.

One thing to keep in mind is that if you plug in a less powerful USB battery pack, it might actually draw power from the laptop rather than sending power to it. When I plugged in a Zerolemon 45W power bank into the GPD Duo, it was the power bank that started to charge rather than the other way around.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that the GPD Duo seems a little less stable when running on battery power. While I’ve never had the computer reboot unexpectedly when it was plugged into a power source, it has unexpectedly restarted several times when I’ve been using the Duo on battery power. I’m not sure how widespread this issue is, and it’s worth keeping in mind that I’m using a version of the GPD Duo that shipped out before the company began sending units to crowdfunding backers. So it’s possible that this problem may not affect every unit, and it’s also possible that future software updates could resolve the issue. But for now, I try to remind myself to save my work periodically when working on battery power.

At one point, I also encountered an issue where the computer simply failed to boot properly. Pressing the power button would cause the fans to spin up and the keyboard backlight to come on, but the screens wouldn’t light up and plugging in an external monitor did nothing to help – it seems like there was no video output because the computer itself wasn’t fully starting.

Eventually I discovered that using a pin to press the reset button on the left side of the computer resolved this issue by restoring the UEFI/BIOS to default settings. The next time I pressed the power button, the computer booted normally, but some of the settings I had changed (like the default behavior of the Fn keys) had reverted to factory settings.

This thing is a pretty amazing laptop

In case I haven’t made it clear, I’ve been very impressed with the way that this dual-screen laptop changes the way I use a mobile computer. You get twice the screen space, plus the ability to take advantage of window-snapping features in Windows (or other operating systems) to quickly arrange your applications across multiple displays.

Want two browser tabs on your top screen and a Word document on the lower display? You can do that by dragging and dropping each window or by using a few keyboard shortcuts (Win+left arrow or Win+Right arrow).

Having one screen above the other also means that the upper display is more likely to be at eye height. One of the problems with most laptops is that you typically have to look down to see the screens, which is less than ideal from an ergonomic standpoint, as it can lead to neck and shoulder pain. That’s why you’ll often see advise to plug a laptop into an external monitor whenever possible, or elevate the laptop on a stand and use an external keyboard.

The GPD Duo is different since the upper display is positioned high enough that you can see it without bending your neck down. So you could put the applications you’ll be looking at most of the time on that screen and use the lower display for content that you may need to glance at occasionally.

This higher-than-usual screen is also great for video calls. The GPD Duo has a 5MP webcam positioned above the lower display. You can easily put the video of the person you’re talking to on the top screen and look that person in the eye without appearing as if you’re looking down or away. Or if you’re recording a video, you can put your script or presentation on the top screen. The webcam, by the way, is pretty good by laptop standards (which isn’t necessarily saying much). It won’t do a great job of capturing images or video in low-light settings, but it is a higher-resolution camera than you get with most laptops, enabling sharper photos as well as support for 1440p video recording 30 frames per second.

Of course, you might not need two screens all the time, so it’s nice that GPD makes it easy to disable the top screen by hitting F3 on the keyboard. Then you can flip that screen so that it’s behind your primary display. In this mode, the GPD Duo looks and functions a lot like a regular laptop. Battery life should also be a little longer in this mode.

Is the GPD Duo a perfect laptop? Not by a longshot – it’s powerful and flexible. But it’s also kind of thick and heavy and gets less battery life than you’d expect from other notebooks with the same processor and battery. And the second screen can be a little wonky at times – it takes a few seconds to start up after the computer turns on and has a habit of losing support for touch input  from time to time (the only way to fix this is to turn the top screen off and back on again by hitting F3 on the keyboard).

But I’m convinced that the idea of a dual-screen laptop with a built-in keyboard (rather than the removable ones that Asus and Lenovo use) is a good one.

It’s not a very good tablet

That said, while the GPD Duo’s design technically allows you to use it as a multi-function computer that could also be a tablet, it’s not very useful in tablet mode.

Sure, you can fold the screens so that they cover the keyboard and leave a 13.3 inch, 2880 x 1800 pixel OLED touchscreen display facing upward. But what you end up with is a 4.85 pound “tablet” that you’re probably not going to want to pick up and hold. The primary display doesn’t turn off when you do this either – it stays on and continues to draw power even though you can’t see it.

And the screen that’s usable in this mode is the secondary display – the one that has an annoying habit of losing support for touchscreen input periodically. So there’s a decent chance that you might have to unfold the laptop and toggle the screen off and back on again if that happens.

While both screens support automatic screen rotation, the top display only switches automatically between landscape and landscape (flipped) modes. That’s fine if you’re just trying to decide if that screen should face the keyboard or away from it. But if you position the screen for use in a tablet-like mode, the only way to switch to portrait orientation is to open up your operating system’s display settings and manually rotate the screen.

So it’s a little strange that GPD bothered to include stylus support. The company says you can use a Microsoft Surface Pen or any other stylus that supports Microsoft Pen Protocol to write or draw on either display, using 4096 levels of pressure sensitivity. But I’m not sure how useful this feature would be on a big, heavy tablet.

As someone with awful handwriting and little artistic ability, I didn’t spend much time using a pen with the GPD Duo, but I did confirm that pen input does work on both screens. But I also confirmed that pen support is as wonky on the top screen as touch support: if touch or pen input isn’t detected then you need to toggle the screen off and back on again before you can use either.

In my brief testing, the GPD Duo also didn’t seem to have any sort of palm rejection technology in place. When I installed Krita and started scribbling with the pen, any time my palm touched the screen it caused things to go haywire – either by drawing lines where I hadn’t wanted them or by switching to a different app or setting if I accidentally touched the taskbar or settings icons with my palm.

And the Windows keyboard doesn’t appear automatically when you touch a text input box, because the computer always thinks that the physical keyboard is attached, even if you’ve folded the screens down so that they’re covering the keyboard. So if you want to use an on-screen keyboard you’ll need to ensure you’ve pinned one to the taskbar so that you can trigger it manually when you need it.

Other notes (Testing Ubuntu, UEFI/BIOS settings, and software updates)

The GPD Duo ships with Windows 11 Home software pre-installed on the SSD, but it’s possible to boot from a USB drive by pressing F7 during startup to access a boot selection menu. So I decided to give Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS a try.

While the operating system booted without any problems and immediately recognized the second screen as an additional monitor, there were a number of issues that made it difficult to interact with the second screen.

For example:

• The GRUB bootloader and Ubuntu splash screen were upside down, but everything was the right way up by the time the operating system finished booting.
• The touchscreen works on the bottom display, but not the top screen.
• If you turn off the top screen, the bottom touchscreen goes wonky – pressing one part of the screen triggers actions on another part of the screen – even after you turn the top screen back on again.
• If you set the display settings so that the screens are Mirrored rather than “Joined” or extended, the bottom screen will be flipped upside down by default. And when you go back from Mirrored to Joined mode, the display scaling changes from 200% to 100%, making everything look tiny. You can change it back, but the bottom screen will remain upside down with no way to change it back from the Display Settings menu.
• By default Ubuntu thinks the displays should be side-by-side (so that when you move the cursor past the right edge of the lower screen it will appear on the left side of the top screen). But if you try to change the display settings so that the upper screen is on top of the lower screen and then turn off the upper display, when you turn it back on the computer will freeze.

It’s possible that these issues could be surmounted with driver updates or command-line configuration changes. But the out-of-the-box experience with Ubuntu is an imperfect one.

There’s also a chance that other GNU/Linux distributions or operating systems may perform better, but I haven’t looked into the matter extensively.

The GPD Duo ships with a relatively open BIOS/UEFI, allowing users to customize many features of the CPU, motherboard, and other hardware. You can enable or disable secure boot, change the behavior of the Fn keys, access CPU overclocking settings, and set a battery charge limit (this won’t stop the battery from charging past the limit, but it’ll stop it from starting to charge until the battery level drops below a certain figure).

As mentioned above, when I first received the GPD Duo it was running an early version of the BIOS/UEFI firmware that lacked certain functions like the ability to invert the way the function keys worked (by default you had to hold down the Fn key to trigger F1 – F12 actions otherwise you’d get the keyboard shortcuts for media, volume, and brightness functions).

The original firmware also had a bug that caused the bottom screen to experience a screen tearing glitch when the top screen was disable.

Since then, GPD has released several BIOS and graphics driver updates and those issues have been resolved those issues for me. But it’s worth noting that you may have problems if you try installing AMD’s official graphics drivers instead of those offered for download by GPD, although some users say that after experiencing performance and reliability issues, they were able to improve the laptop’s stability by performing a clean install of Windows using Windows Media Creation Tool rather than the GPD ISO, and then downloading and installing the official AMD graphics driver and other drivers for the computer’s hardware.

Again, I did not go through those steps and I’ve had no major issues running Windows 11 on the GPD Duo. But I do worry a little bit about the long-term support picture for this unusual hardware that is already no longer in production.

Verdict

In some ways, the GPD Duo is a departure for GPD, which has typically focused on smaller computers like handheld gaming PCs and mini-laptops. The GPD Duo is neither of those things.

But in another way, it’s exactly the sort of thing I’ve come to expect from the company: a product that takes an outside-the-box approach to the entire idea of what you can do with a portable computer.

Having a second screen built into a traditional laptop may not sound all that different from what you’d get if you carried around a laptop plus a portable monitor or if you used a dual-screen device like the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i or Asus Zenbook Duo that have removable keyboards. But having everything built into a single device makes a world of difference.

The GPD Duo doesn’t feel like two separate devices (laptop plus display, or dual-screen tablet plus keyboard). It’s first and foremost a laptop. It just happens to be one that has a second screen that takes a little longer to turn on than the first, and which has its own brightness control buttons on the side.

And because of the 360 degree hinge that attaches the second screen to the first, you can use the two screens in interesting ways. In addition to positioning one display above the other, you can flip the screens so they’re back to back to share your screen with someone across from you. Or you can fold the screens down over the keyboard so that one is facing upward for use in a tablet-like mode (even if the tablet experience isn’t great). You can also use just the second screen as a portable monitor that connects to other devices with a USB-C cable.

The GPD Duo isn’t for everyone. It’s a bit thicker and heavier than most modern 13.3 inch laptops that have just a single display, which could make it a bit more of a hassle to carry around. The battery life is decent for a device with two high-resolution OLED displays, but not amazing by modern laptop standards. And the fans can get pretty noisy when the system is under heavy load.

But overall I’ve really enjoyed my time using the GPD Duo, and I hope we see more devices with this sort of design in the future.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned at the outset, the GPD Duo is a difficult to recommend. It’s expensive. It’s made by a company that has a reputation for offering limited support for its products. And perhaps most importantly, it’s already been discontinued shortly after launch: while you can still pick one up from a handful of retailers, GPD has stopped manufacturing the GPD Duo and no longer sells it directly to customers through its own channels. So while the company says it will continue to offer some software updates and support for this device, it’s unclear how long that will last.

I’d like to thank GPD for providing Liliputing with a demo unit for testing purposes.