the idea of an arm- powered device that maximizes efficiency in battery life
while offering adequate performance is a pretty good one and it's funny to me
that on the laptop side of things everyone's kind of going that direction
while on the handheld gaming side of things I'm looking at a device like the
IOP pocket s asking in a world where the steam deck and its various competitors
exist why do you need to I will say this
right out of the box the form factor G
justifies it a little bit I actually am
kind of loving the feel of this thing IO has apparently been working on this with
Qualcomm for nearly a year and it features qualcomm's New g3x Gen 2 can I
just say for a moment I hate their branding in a nutshell this is a gaming
Centric so that seems to be most closely related to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 with a
similar octacore layout but a beefed up
GPU that runs at a higher clock speed which in our testing we did observe has
an impact on the heat of the device in
its highest performance profile let's just say it got a little toasty
especially up in the top left where the S so is speakers a fully-fledged USB 3.2
Gen 2 Port ooh micro SD expansion hey so
it turns out they can put these on phones see I thought it was impossible
hey Gary what's the side switch do oh it's a turbo mode switch we got our
bumpers our triggers which are hall effect as well as our tertiary buttons
volume and of course our power of course the real action is happening on the face
which has a better than a DS but not as
good as a full-size joystick like feel I actually really don't mind this layout
the d-pad has been a source of consternation in the community the feel
to it seems suitably adequate for me but
IO has acknowledged the issues and are apparently issuing fixes oh this is a
fixed one oh well that explains why it feels good then oo fully unleash the
performance got it proceed we actually wouldn't
necessarily recommend that we found that the best balance of battery life
performance and user experience was in balanced performance mode with the low
fan mode and boy I can see why you guys
adjusted the fan mode good gravy does this thing ever ramp
up jeez guys I want to take a quick look
at the rest of the buttons but before I do that Gary's going to put the back of
his body in the frame car come on this side look they didn't have video cameras
when he was born so Gary yes I can't figure out what half
of these buttons do okay these don't seem to do anything yeah uh this is the
most important one so that's cool ispace is something that I do have experience
with on their x86 handheld devices okay controller configuration this is a big
bug bear for these Android devices is yeah sure there's so many emulators that
are available for the platform now but sometimes getting controls bound to them
can be a problem and it was great here right yes oh no it
wasn't performance was actually quite good but U mapping the controls was a
hit and miss Affair let me try it out and before I do that I'm going to tell
you about our sponsor LTT Store.com has a present for you ooh present from LTT
store.com some fragrant limes
um oh the desk pad thank
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the first thousand people to buy a circuit desk pad will get a free razor Mouse really a free Mouse with a desk
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these ones available each day so check out all the deals at LTT Store.com some
of their main selling points for this thing are the beefy Vapor chamber cooler
as well as their like biology inspired
metal ring around the outside that I'm
really not sure if I fully understand what the heck it is that they're talking
about but I will say that the cooling
definitely seems to add some heft to this thing this is a dense device fun
fact by the way hall effect does not mean quality it just means that it uses
magnetic actuation like it uses magnetism to determine where exactly the
stick is tilted the mechanical centering
is still done by not magnets and if there's any inconsistency from one to
the next then you could still need to have a lot of slop or big dead zones
built into your product in order to make sure that when it's centered your
character isn't you know moving around or or or drifting
seriously I can't bind the right stick to pan the oh my God man talk about
fixing one problem and creating another one I got my cool onscreen controls and
everything too bad I can't see anything what's going on see yeah just like yeah
exactly like I've got about as much
visibility as you guys do I think so you can see it's like it's trying to work
what are you even doing buddy oh yeah look at
that oh I could make this work no no I got this I just need way more actions
per minute one of the big highlights is of course the screen which uh now that
I've turned it up all the way it's pretty darn bright we measured it at
just over the 400 nits that it's rated for that right stick thing just stay in
the middle are you kidding me right now settings theoretically I shouldn't have
to do this anyway this game has controller
support man which is a shame cuz this is
the kind of thing I'd love to play on the performance in our testing was
pretty solid we got anywhere from 6 to 10 hours of battery life depending on
the performance profile the screen was pretty good it's IPS so you're not going
to get that amazing contrast that you'd get out of an OLED but it exceeded their
specifications for brightness and had reasonable color volume I even quite
like the ergonomics it's just that some of the oversights here I just don't
understand how they made their way into a finished product this controller
binding issue like you can buy a backbone strap it to your Android phone
and you're immediately having a better experience also the screen for all the
good things that I said about it is only 60 HZ which means you're not even really
taking advantage of the highest possible
performance you can get out of this device because you're going to be 60fps
locked the other big one for us is the price I mean if this was coming in and
it was 250 50 bucks or something like
that like it was a higher performance version of something like a Logitech
g-cloud and I could just use this to stream games all day and night off of
Microsoft service or off of NVIDIA's game streaming service well all of a
sudden at least it's got a reason for existing but starting at
$59 I mean good Lord you're up against
the entry level price for an x86 handheld and I mean they could run like
any game you want does IO have justification for any of this other than
please buy it oh there's a 1440p limited
edition but then wait that's the only one that we can seem to find for sale so
in theory it actually starts at around $400 it's just that that's for the 1080p
version that we can't seem to find for sale anywhere I it was a funny company
every once in a while they absolutely nail it and then there's this the Ayn
Odin on paper doesn't look as good but at the much lower price makes a lot of
sense I don't know maybe we'll see some a future handheld from them since
they're collaborating with qualcom anyway and we'll get something more like
a gaming handheld version of a Snapdragon X Elite or something like
that and it'll it'll like really be awesome uh I just don't see putting my
money into this one but I see putting my money into ShortCircuit so subscribe so
that I don't waste it hey