The OneXPlayer X1 has a bunch of ‘wish’ features that could make this interesting take on the market a truly great handheld gaming PC. If only Meteor Lake silicon were efficient enough to deliver game-changing handheld battery life. I wish the Xe GPU architecture was more reliable at delivering consistent frame rates in games. I wish those controllers weren’t so empty, trust-consuming and didn’t get in our way. I wish it wasn’t designed to work with a magnetic keyboard.
That said, I still have genuine affection for it, but to be honest I don’t think I’ll ever use it as anything other than the clunky tablet PC it’s essentially at its heart. While there’s no escaping the fact of it, it’s a device that looks a bit ridiculous when you plug in a keyboard and elephant ear controllers.
Because OneXPlayer offers the X1 as a three-in-one device: a tablet PC, a laptop and a gaming portable. And the moment I see this on any marketing slide, I instinctively think, ‘I’m a jack of all trades, but a master of none.’ And you’ll almost love the money.
‘Almost’, because not only does it fail to succeed in any of these form factors, but most of the time it’s actually Good at all. This isn’t even a ‘jack’. Perhaps oddly enough, it’s at its worst as a handheld gaming PC, and that’s down to the controller peripherals, which took some time to be finalized and delivered before this review. If this is what we end up with, I hate to think what the original prototypes felt like in our hands.
X1 features
PROCESSOR: Intel Core 7 Ultra 155H
Nuclei: 16
Thread: 22
GPU: Intel Arc
Memory: 32GB LPDDR5x-7467
Screen size: 11 inch
Native resolution: 2560×1600
Refresh rate: 120Hz
Storing: 1TB SSD
Battery: 65 Wh
GC: 1x Oculink (PCIe 4.0 x 4), 2x USB 4 Type-C, 1x USB 3.2 Type-A, 1x 3.5 mm audio, 1x TF Card 4.0
Dimensions: 252x163x13mm
Weight: ~789g
Price: $1,100
I actually had the OneXPlayer X1 as a prototype device for a long time, but the controllers finally arrived and I was able to see what the whole package was like. And it was a disappointment.
Before this, as a thick Meteor Lake tablet, I really enjoyed having an 11-inch device with a pretty nice 120Hz 1600p display that I could play Football Manager in bed with. The Core Ultra CPU and iGPU are more than capable of delivering excellent frame rates at this level, and they do it completely silently. But I have to say, even after a few Arc driver updates I’m still getting some weird graphical artifacts when running the game on battery power. This is what Intel graphics are like these days…
For comparison, if I’m playing FM on Framework 13 with a Ryzen 7 7840U chip in it, the damn sound sounds like it’s trying to take off, like the turbine whirring of its fans. The fact that I can get the same basic performance without any audible noise is an absolute win for the X1.
So yeah, there’s this: OneXPlayer is silent, and the OneXConsole software is the same as previous AMD-powered handhelds, giving you a huge amount of control over the device’s power demands and fan curve. It helps you balance performance and battery consumption with an easy interface.
And like I said, this screen is very nice. It’s bright, sharp, big, has a high resolution (nice on the desktop, but perhaps less so due to in-game GPU demands) and comes with a 120Hz refresh rate, which makes it feel stylish. That’s what I’m into, and that’s probably what drives me to use it again and again.
But this is as good as it gets.
This is not a good form factor for a laptop-like device.
The laptop experience is not like the laptop experience. The device comes with a leather-like back cover that can also be used as a folding stand, allowing you to operate it in a sort of Microsoft Surface style, a pale laptop imitation. Admittedly, the magnetically attached keyboard is larger and more useful than the terrible keyboard you can use with the OneXPlayer 2 Pro, with longer travel on the keys and a larger trackpad. It will definitely work if you’re forced to use it as the only possible way to use a laptop, but it’s not my preference.
That said, the keys don’t feel bad when typing, and there’s enough space between and around the keys to make typing on them not a completely uncomfortable experience. Considering how much the squeaky keeb is missing from the 2 Pro, this is a definite improvement. Even the trackpad is impressively responsive.
It’s just not a good form factor for a laptop-like device. The keyboard will happily rotate upwards, but there’s nothing holding it in place, so with enough force to disconnect it will happily rotate downwards again, sending it flying. This flapping action will also wake up a sleeping X1, which will do no good in terms of battery life.
It also doesn’t connect controllers to the side of the device. Not because they particularly exhausted themselves, but because they completely stopped the X1 from going into sleep mode for more than three seconds before the screen came back on.
When you’re trying to use this as a handheld gaming PC, you want to be able to move around with it and pause your game at any time to come back to it later. Not being able to do this is a big deficiency. And honestly, that’s probably one of the things that makes it almost impossible to recommend this mode.
This is quite different from the feel of controllers, which move around a lot in their positions on either side of the screen and the buttons don’t map perfectly to the device. They also feel very light, but worst of all the decision to balance the thumb sticks here results in the right stick being mostly unusable in-game. I normally prefer an offset Xbox controller layout, but here you have to bend your thumb a lot to be able to use both the stick and trigger/shoulder buttons comfortably.
Controllers and keyboard also have a large impact on the device’s I/O. There are two USB Type-C ports on the left side, while Type-A and an SD card slot are located on the right side. There’s also an Oculink connection at the top. But due to this keyboard arrangement, there’s no charging socket on the bottom, and when you plug in the controllers you effectively lose access to one of the Type-C ports and the SD card slot opposite. And indeed, if you have anything plugged into the second Type-C port, it becomes annoying to fiddle with it to press the shoulder button on that side.
If you were to consider 3DMark scores alone, this would be the most powerful handheld gaming device on the market.
Then we come to the inner part and the actual gaming performance. One of the reasons I haven’t reviewed the OneXPlayer
At the heart of the Meteor Lake CPU is a relatively powerful iGPU. In theory. And if you take the 3DMark scores alone, it becomes the most powerful handheld gaming device on the market. Unfortunately, Intel’s Alchemist GPU architecture still can’t be relied upon to deliver consistently high performance across a variety of games. Sometimes it will nearly match the Radeon 780M in the Ryzen 7 7840U/Z1 Extreme chips, and sometimes it will fall well behind.
That’s not a good thing for such a costly gaming device, right?
It wouldn’t be such a problem if there were some redeeming features to using the Meteor Lake chip. Sometimes I could deal with the fact that I could get 10% less gaming performance if I got a lot more battery life. However, Intel chips are not that efficient compared to competing AMD processors, even if they run at the same TDP. I still only got an hour and 15 minutes on the PCMark 10 gaming battery life test at full power; here Ayaneo Kun (now with a fixed d-pad after RMA, no less) is just 60 seconds shy of two hours. .
Obviously, the game’s runtime varies depending on the settings and the game you’re playing, but it certainly doesn’t outperform AMD-powered devices in key metrics that matter to gamers.
If you buy…
✅ You want a solid Windows tablet: The X1 is essentially an 11-inch Windows tablet that can deliver generally good 1080p gaming performance on touchscreen PC games.
Do not buy if…
❌ You want a handheld game console with a big screen: On the surface, that beautiful screen and elephant ear controllers might seem like a great solution, but the truth is that connections are poor, controls are unreliable, and ergonomics are frustratingly uncomfortable.
❌ You were hoping for Meteor Lake’s epic battery life: Despite all of Intel’s efficiency claims, the Meteor Lake chip in the X1 doesn’t offer anything special in terms of battery life.
This probably explains why OneXPlayer created the new X1 Mini and switched to the newer Ryzen 7 8840U chip instead of using another Intel processor. And I don’t see OneXPlayer returning. Maybe if this big X1 had a Ryzen chip inside, I’d be more accepting of it since we wouldn’t have the graphical quirks or inconsistent performance. But I still take issue with its three-in-one form factor and limited practicality.
I didn’t even mention the price outside of the specs box above; It would have to be a serious budget option to have any hope of getting a recommendation from me, and frankly it isn’t. It’s a similar story with all OneXPlayer and Ayaneo devices; They’re much more expensive than mass-market handhelds from Asus and Lenovo.
But at least they are both devices that are good at what they do. The standard package for this X1 with controllers and magnetic keyboard is $1,100. You can buy a real laptop that consistently delivers better gaming performance. And A Steam Deck for this money.
All in all, I don’t think I want to use the OneXPlayer X1 as a laptop analogue, I don’t want to use it as a handheld gaming PC, which means only the chunky tablet PC mode actually works. And only then Football Manager is in bed, graphical glitches and all.