Onexplayer Mini Review: A Steam Deck Alternative With Some Big Advantages

thegamer.com:

While handheld PCs aren’t exactly new, the Steam Deck has brought a lot of attention to the market, which in turn has spurred rapid innovation among would-be competitors to Valve’s flagship device.

One such Steam Deck alternative is the Onexplayer, a Windows-enabled machine that comes with a surprising number of bells and whistles. I’ve spent a week using the seven-inch Onexplayer Mini as my daily driver, and it's a handheld I’m happy to recommend to anyone who isn’t willing to indefinitely wait on Valve’s preorder list - provided the sticker shock doesn’t kill you first.

To preface my impressions of the Onexplayer Mini, the device I’ve been testing isn’t actually available outside of China. Mine is the special Gundam Edition, which has an Intel chipset and beautiful Gundam-inspired design. The product you can order today from the Onexplayer store is black with orange buttons and uses AMD architecture. The hardware differences mean I can’t speak directly to performance and compatibility. Some games that ran fantastically on my unit, like Metal Gear Solid 5 and God of War, might not work as well on the AMD version. The inverse is also true, I can’t recommend Halo Infinite or Elden Ring, which both felt sluggish and choppy on the Intel version, but might run smoothly on the AMD iteration.

Related: Steam Deck Helped Me Embrace Low Settings

What I can confidently talk about is the form factor and features, which impressed me a lot. At just 10.2 inches, the Onexplayer Mini is more than an inch shorter than the Steam Deck and a lot more comfortable to hold. It has an almost identical width to the Switch, but the thicker body and rounded back plate makes it so much easier and more ergonomic. At 619 grams I did start to feel