Most students now juggle phones, tablets, and laptops, with messaging and games living right next to textbooks and notes. That mix can be powerful but also distracting, especially in crowded Chinese classrooms where space and attention are both limited. Pokepad is a portable PC concept that tries to carve out a focused, pocketable space dedicated to learning, treating study tools as worthy of their own hardware.
Pokepad is a smart learning device designed specifically for students, intended to cover most of their daily study scenarios. It is compact and portable enough to fit into school bags and coat pockets, and the goal is unrestricted learning, a device that can travel from classroom to bus to bedroom without feeling like a shrunken laptop or a repurposed phone fighting for attention against notifications and app alerts.
Designers: DaPengPeng (DPP), Wengkang Cheng, Qi M
The design team experimented with multiple shapes before settling on a slim rectangular box concept, balancing learning apps, hardware needs, and clever portability. The box footprint keeps it familiar enough to slip into existing routines, yet distinct from a phone, with enough internal volume for a decent battery, speakers, and a pen mechanism, without turning into a bulky tablet that refuses to fit anywhere.
The built-in flip pen is central to the concept. To ensure portability, slimness, and differentiation, the team chose to hide the stylus inside the body, so it flips out when needed and disappears when not. That decision reinforces Pokepad as a pen-first device for note-taking, annotation, and handwriting practice, and avoids the classic problem of separate styluses getting lost in backpacks or rolling off desks during lectures.
The soft-edged, minimal aesthetic uses rounded corners, a single camera module, and a small “100” logo that nods to perfect test scores. Colour options range from clean white and light blue to a more playful red with a textured back for grip. The branding and palette position Pokepad as a study companion rather than a gaming gadget, something that feels at home in a pencil case next to erasers and rulers.
The interface is geared toward classes, homework, notes, a dictionary, and voice recording, rather than a full app store. The idea is to centralise tasks that are currently split across paper notebooks and phones, giving students a dedicated place to scan assignments, jot down ideas with the pen, and review materials on the go, without the constant pull of unrelated apps demanding screen time.
Pokepad takes the idea of a learning device seriously enough to design hardware, UI, and branding around school life, instead of treating students as a side market for general tablets. A pocketable box with a flip pen and a “100” on the back suggests a quieter, more focused path for everyday study tech, where the device earns its footprint by doing one category of tasks well instead of trying to be everything at once.
