Browsing through Black Friday deals, I came across this mini PC with a touchscreen from Geekbuying, currently costing $189.99, down from $209.99 thanks to a time-limited Black Friday offer ($20 off $200). The Meenhong JX2 is a real mini PC strapped to a 5.7-inch portable monitor; it’s by no means powerful but its Intel N5105 CPU, with its four cores and four threads, should be enough for most mundane tasks (no gaming or creative workloads though).
These are currently the best Black Friday mini PC deals
The JX2 includes 8GB of DDR4 RAM and a 256GB SSD (you can add another SATA one). There’s plenty of cooling vents which - alongside the aluminum chassis - should help with power dissipation. Shame that it is not a passive model; you still need a fan for active cooling.
From the side, it looks like a docking station, measuring only 160 x 80 x 20mm. It has plenty of ports as well, eight in all, including a Type-C power delivery one which means you can also use it with a recent smartphone power adaptor (you need at least 30W though). Alternatively you could plug in a portable power station or a laptop battery.
It runs on Windows 11 Pro, not Windows 11 Home, but is also compatible with Ubuntu; the built-in display would be useful as a second or third sidekick screen to display messages or alerts; the JX2 supports two monitors. It doesn’t have a kickstand, a microSD card reader or a built-in webcam, so is designed to lay flat on a surface.
It is not the first time that mini PC with tiny screens have appeared on my radar; the Gole Gole1 Plus and the Gole Gole1 come to mind. I’ve asked for a review sample. I would love to see whether anyone comes up with a modular concept where a mini PC can be connected to a portable monitor and a laptop battery to deliver a working Windows tablet. Maybe Framework?
