Once upon a time, we used to have desktops so large that they would sit under our desks as well as palm-sized personal digital assistants with 3-inch screens that could handle basic web browsing and email, but were not intended for productivity.
Fast forward to today, we have smartphones with screens larger than six inches that barely fit in a pocket and are also not optimized for productivity, but we have palm-sized desktops that are still good enough for nearly all office workloads. Some of them are quite cheap as well.
Among the ultra-compact desktops, the recently announced ECS Liva Q1D and Liva Q1L come in a 74 x 74 x 34.6mm chassis while providing basic office features such as two display outputs and two gigabit ports.
ECS system LIVA Q1D And Liva Q1L The systems are based on Lake Apollo from Intel Celeron N3350 (2C / 2T, 1.10GHz-2.40GHz, HD Graphics 500, 6W TDP) or Pentium N4200 (4C / 4T, 1.10GHz – 2.50GHz, HD Graphics 505, 6W TDP) on chipset paired with 2GB or 4GB LPDDR4 memory plus a 32GB or 64GB eMMC.
Connectivity-wise, the ECS Liva Q1D and Liva Q1L feature Wi-Fi 5, Bluetooth 4.1, three USB Type-C ports (two USB 3.0 and one USB 1.0) and a micro-SD card slot. The main difference between the two systems is the difference in width and connection to networks:
- The Liva Q1D has two display outputs (DisplayPort 1.2, HDMI 2.0), but one gigabit port.
- The Live Q1L has an HDMI 2.0 display connector and two GbE ports.
Using Intel Apollo Lake SoCs launched in 2016 for late 2020 systems seems a bit strange, but it shouldn’t be a complete surprise. Many companies use Apollo Lake Computers and will continue to populate a familiar platform instead of moving to something new. To that end, PC makers such as ECS will continue to offer Apollo Lake powered systems as there is demand for them.
One particularly good feature of the ECS Liva Q1D and Liva Q1L UCFF devices is their price. The cheapest configuration with the Intel Celeron N3350 SoC costs $ 210, while the more advanced PC with the Intel Pentium N4200 costs $ 240.
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