The promised versatility of a three-in-one device is less desirable than a thing designed specifically to do something well. Only the tablet mode of the X1 feels actually functional and even then it's very chunky. Otherwise its combination of flaky Meteor Lake frame rates, obstructed ports, and wobbly controllers make it a less than desirable gaming handheld.Our experienced team dedicates many hours to every review, to really get to the heart of what matters most to you.
'Almost', because not only does it fail to excel in any of those form factors, but it often isn't actuallyat all. It's not even a 'jack'. Perhaps strangely, it's at its worst as a gaming handheld PC, and that's all down to the controller peripherals, which took an age to be finalised and delivered ahead of this review. I hate to think how the original prototypes felt in hand if this is what we end up with.
So yeah, there is that: The OneXPlayer is quiet, and the OneXConsole software is the same as on its previous AMD-powered handhelds, giving you a huge amount of control over the power demands and fan curve of the device. It helps you balance the performance and the battery hit with an easy interface. It's just that this is not a good form factor for a laptop-like device. The keyboard will happily flip up but nothing is holding it in place, so it will happily flap down again with enough force to disconnect, sending it flying. That action of flapping about will also wake up a sleeping X1, which is going to do nothing good for its battery life.
The controllers and keyboard also have a huge impact on the I/O of the device, too. There are two USB Type-C ports on the left-hand side and a Type-A and SD card slot on the right-hand side. You also get an Oculink connection on the top. But there's no charging socket on the bottom side because of that keyboard provision, and when you attach the controllers you effectively lose access to one of the Type-C ports and the opposing SD card slot.
The Meteor Lake CPU at its heart has a relatively powerful iGPU in it. Theoretically. And if you were to take the 3DMark scores in isolation it would seem to be the most powerful gaming handheld on the market. Unfortunately, Intel's Alchemist GPU architecture still can't be trusted to give consistently high performance across a suite of games. Sometimes it will just about match the Radeon 780M in the Ryzen 7 7840U/Z1 Extreme chips, other times it will fall well behind.