Setup and Everyday Use

Like we said, this is our first stick PC review, and it’s probably the fastest desktop setup we ever tried. Plug in the stick into an HDMI port, connect the power, add a keyboard/mouse (or in our case an airmouse), and that’s it. We basically went from unboxing to a boot screen in a minute or two.

The retail box includes a 5V DC adapter, but you can use any 2A USB charger to power it. The cable is a tad too short for our liking, about 120cm. You also get a USB OTG cable and small HDMI extension cord. The latter is important because at 38.6mm, the stick could be too wide to plug into your TV or monitor if you already populated the adjacent HDMI or DVI ports. The extension cable makes it possible.

Like the P1, the Beelink Pocket P2 has a lot of tablet DNA, so a number of features found on traditional SFF machines are missing. For example, you can’t access BIOS and there is no way of playing around with overscan settings. When we reviewed the P1, we said overscan could be a problem for some users, but the P2 got the resolution and scaling right when we plugged it in (which we didn’t expect). To be honest, we may have been too harsh last time around, since we expected the Intel Compute Stick would address these shortcomings. In the meantime, reviewers got their paws on Intel’s micro PC and reported experiencing the exact same issue, so we really can’t hold it against Beelink.

Since we are dealing with tablet hardware, power consumption is ridiculously low. You can watch YouTube or browse while consuming just a couple of watts of power. This is what stick PCs are really for. Due to their size, they really can’t cope with high loads and if you’re looking for a machine that will run at load for hours at a time, you really need to consider an Intel NUC or similar alternatives.
However, in a living room scenario, throttling is not an issue. We doubt many people will run serious productivity software on their stick PCs, use them for gaming or any other tasks that will suffer from aggressive throttling (or cause it in the first place).

Speaking of living rooms and TVs, we decided to try out Beelink stick with an airmouse, which really helped its cause and improved user experience, so let’s take a closer look at this combo.