Weekly Blog

Handheld PCs have a dirty secret the spec sheets never mention: the hardware is only half the purchase. The other half is the year after, the driver that fixes the stutter, the BIOS that unlocks the thermal headroom, the firmware that makes the controller behave, and whether any of it arrives without a forum scavenger hunt. Plenty of capable devices have aged badly on...

Two device categories spent a decade politely ignoring each other. Professional tablets grew styluses, biometrics, and color-accurate screens, and treated games as something phones do. Gaming consoles perfected controllers, game libraries, and plug-and-play simplicity, and treated productivity as heresy. Between them sat a canyon, and in it, every person who is both a professional and a player, carrying two devices as a toll. OneXPlayer...

Eighty watts, sustained, in a device you hold. To anyone who follows handheld hardware, that sentence reads like a typo. The category's physics settled years ago at roughly 30W: the most heat that small fans can move at bearable noise, from a chassis that also has to stay touchable. Every handheld since has lived under that number. The ONEXPLAYER APEX runs at 80W sustained...

Two cables can connect the same ONEXGPU 2 to the same device, and they do not deliver the same product. One hands you nearly everything the RX 7800M inside can do. The other quietly keeps 15 to 25 percent of it. If you own an OCuLink-equipped OneXPlayer device, or you're choosing your next one, this is the difference worth understanding before the dock arrives....

Expandability is the spec that reveals what a device believes about its own future. Some machines ship complete and closed; these two ship as starting points. The ONEXPLAYER Super X packs its expansion inward, the deepest onboard I/O and storage in the tablet family, while the X1 Pro points its expansion outward, through the port that turns it into the hub of a modular...

The best portable Windows AI workstations for local LLM inference: memory math by model tier, a 96GB VRAM flagship, and real gaming on the same silicon.

An ecosystem is the difference between buying a device and joining something. Devices age alone; ecosystems compound, every accessory that fits, every save that follows you, every update that arrives, every future product that slots in beside the last one. The Windows handheld category spent years shipping impressive orphans. One brand has spent this generation building the connected version instead. The answer to the...

Every few years a chip arrives that doesn't improve a category so much as invalidate its assumptions. For Windows handhelds, that chip is AMD's Strix Halo, the Ryzen AI Max family, and the assumptions it invalidated were load-bearing: that integrated graphics meant compromise, that handheld memory meant starvation, and that "console-class" was the ceiling a portable could aspire to. Here's what actually changed, and...

"Native" is the word doing the work in this question, and enthusiasts choose it deliberately. Upscalers are excellent, frame generation is genuinely transformative, but some buyers want the baseline first: real rendered pixels at 2880x1800, real rendered frames, no interpolation in the chain, with the clever technologies as a bonus layer rather than a crutch. That's a much harder spec to meet, and in...

The number first, because that's what you came for: 95 to 177 percent, measured in real games. Then the more useful answer, because that range is wide for a reason: how much of it you collect depends almost entirely on what you play. Here's the boost broken down by game type, and the two combinations that deliver it in full. The Measured Numbers, Game...