oh excuse me sorry was trying to test a theory and I guess I was right it seems
like every time I sneeze somebody releases a new one of these handheld PCS
it's at the point now where pretty much no matter what form factor or spec
you're interested in there is something for you meet the iono flip DS a uh
Brazen attempt at creating a machine
that looks like it will be absolutely perfect for Nintendo DS emulation but in
truth it's a little bit more complicated than that let's have a look at the
machine it's thick the top looks really slick though
oh this is something it's available in two colors black and wouldn't recommend
uh this has only been used for a couple of hours by our Labs team for testing
and you can already see it's starting to look pretty dirty those are replaceable
these are replaceable hey there we go huh well
let's see what else is in the
package wow damn boy 65 Watts detachable
USBC cable love to see it oh different
textured grip pieces they're worse USBC
cable looks like a 6ft cable and I was
wrong it's a 5ft cable what a bizarre C cable length Okay International adapters
and USBC to a adapters for one and two
oh I guess now's a good time to look at the io of this thing on the top you've
got your right triggers these are hall effect triggers you've got your shoulder
buttons you've got a third button really love to see that programmable you've got
a Micro SD slot just a little something like that then we've got two USBC ports
one is USB 3 one is USB 4 so there's the
possibility that you could run Thunderbolt compatible with peripherals
like external GPU Docks but it's not a guarantee on AMD platforms and it can be
a little bit flaky and of course you probably wouldn't want to anyway because
that's right my friends we've got an oculink connector now unlike Thunderbolt
or USB 4 it's not hot pluggable so you can't just plug in your GPU whenever you
feel like but if you shut down your system plug in an oculink egpu then boot
up your system you don't have to deal with some of the additional protocol
overhead of these interfaces and you get a full PCIe gen 4x4 connection meaning
even reasonably performant modern gpus should run really freaking well in this
thing what else we got here we've got stereo speakers on the bottom like to
see the bottom mounted headphone jack appreciate that although I wouldn't mind
it if one of these USBC ports was on the bottom at the back wow that's a lot of
ventilation intake exhaust and that
makes sense because inside we've got the same well I shouldn't say the same I was
going to say the same processor that's been taking the handheld Market by storm
the Z1 extreme I mean 7840 u i mean 8840
U that's right my friends it's not the
same because it has more neural processing it's actually kind of funny
if you load up the pages for the 7840 U
and the 8840 u in two tabs and then flip
between them one of them's Global and one of them's Global and China and Japan
in between those processor releases China and Japan joined the globe yeah
these are very similar processors and I'm making such a big deal about it because technically this unit is
available with either the 7,000 series or 8,000 series both of which have the
same eight zen4 cores the clock up to 5.1 GHz just like the Z1 extreme and
they've got the same Radeon 78m graphics
like the Z1 extreme the only difference is whether you get the last gen neural
processor or the 8000 series slightly before neural processor what you'll be
doing on it on a device like this I have no idea but that's something for you to
figure out not me wow this is a big screen I don't know what it is maybe
it's just like the muscle memory of it but the last time I used a dual screen
device it was a Nintendo DS so I was just a little surprised to see such a
actually large and vibrant screen iono
seems to have absolutely no idea what the specs of this thing are they
advertise everything from 400 nits I think it is to 550 nits but when we
measured it in our lab we got over 800 nits which is extremely bright for an
SDR display making this thing easily usable even Outdoors which is pretty
cool grayscale performance was okay at
2.4 was a little on the warm side good for HD video but it'll be a little
darker than normal for reference or desktop content and it managed 97%
coverage of the srgb color space which is fine color accuracy was also fine and
the same can pretty much be said of the bottom display except that it had a
little bit better gamut coverage and doesn't get as bright let's talk about
the inputs H it's quite flat though I'm
sure any resemblance to the Nintendo DS is quite coincidental but unlike the DS
instead of going with you know those awful slidy joysticks in order to keep
it flat they've got a pretty decent range of motion on these and they've
just recessed them under the surface I guess that's a big part of the reason
this thing is so bloody thick because
look how much of the space is being taken up by these joysticks they feel
okay though I think it's a pretty okay tradeoff actually ergonomics are
generally pretty okay especially considering this thing's considerable
heft what else have we got going on here we've got a button for Io space okay so
we can adjust our power profile we can adjust our performance overlay sure
let's turn that on let's go simple though we can adjust our fan
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first purchase or subscription uh do you want me to turn the brightness down on
this a little bit I think it was okay all right let's figure out what all the buttons do uh uhhuh oh we've got Dr a
mouse oh there we go so they're just set up in a pretty St um how do I right
click yeah well that's left click oh
hey there it is nice let's have a look at the display settings okay that's a
sensible config yeah it's definitely too bright do you want me to turn it down Glen okay let's lose some of this 800
nits of brightness here oh there's one of those little CH oh that is uh not the
best one of these little trackpads I've ever used all right we got our oh cool
some programmable buttons select the window to move to the secondary screen
okay sure we did come across some
bugginess managing applications between the two screens including a weird one
where when we were doing our battery testing we found that extinguishing the
bottom screen didn't really have a significant impact on battery life uh
because it was still showing up to Windows and it was still outputting to
it it was just a full black screen at whatever brightness it was at as far as
we could tell but the good news is that it's Windows so when it comes to window
management across multiple screens there are lots of different options both built
into the operating system and from third parties so you got your standard Xbox C
buttons right here you've got whatever this button oh okay ah go
to desktop button let's see what this button does it is okay but if we do
that oh I see so that overlay is an
overlay it sits in the foreground okay so this toggles that
functionality that's pretty cool oh one thing I haven't mentioned power buttons
here built-in fingerprint scanner love to see
it I am not a fan of these vibration Motors can I just get that out there
right now you can hear what I don't like about them I
bet uh let's see if we can adjust that a little bit okay vibration high oh
that'll probably oh guys really the controller
is working both in game and in I
well high is that but more let's try
low well not great vibration Motors I
mean hey how about this performance though all right are we actually getting
over 100 FPS in PS of horizon 5 right now overall gaming performance on this
device was very solid not as good as the
Rog Ally curiously it seems like iano is
prioritizing CPU clock speed compared to GPU clock speed but pretty much in line
with what you'd expect from a Z1 extreme 78 40u or 8840 U how are these
speakers not very direct sometimes you can tell and sometimes you can really
tell but these are down firing
AF they're allowed though
very tiny though of course if what you're after is the perfect machine to
play Nintendo DS games I bet you're
willing to overlook kind of mediocre speakers cuz like realistically how good
were the speakers on the DS now I should clarify all of my hours in Mario Kart DS
were on a DS and that's kind of for good reason DS emulation is good in terms of
performance but in terms of um
configuring for the dual screen layout of the DS It's not that great um it
turns out this is kind of how you're intended to do it with most of the
emulators there are hacky ways to get it to work a little bit better than this
but um I saw a comment on a forum from a
prominent member I don't think they were a developer but they were certainly a prominent member saying yeah if we had
that option you'd try it for a little bit and then you'd be like ah forget it
it's better to just have the screens right next to each other I think I might
kind of agree well here let's let's give this a shot yeah what's the benefit of
having all this white space other than nostalgia laying it out like this I'm
not sure there's some other challenges with playing DS games on a machine like
this I guess one of the big ones is like why would you do that the battery life
is going to be a fraction of what you'd get from an actual DS which is running a
glorified Smartwatch processor by today's standards we got anywhere from
under an hour in our extreme stress test
to about 5 hours in our endurance test
which is very respectable for something running a 45 hour battery with this kind
of processor horsepower but nothing compared to what you'd get on a DS the
other big issue is that if you really want to Pirate DS games
um the DS is thoroughly thoroughly
hacked at this point not going to lie guys if I really wanted to emulate the
DS I think I'd almost rather have a Game
Boy like form factor with a really tall screen then I just don't have the
unnecessary gap between my screens that doesn't really yeah seem to contribute
anything we got a little hyper fixated on the Nintendo DS we forgot about 3DS
gameplay but if you're wondering it also plays fantastic and look you can use
both the screens handy for uh throwing
nuts at your foes bam we're playing at 3x resolution and everything is buttery
smooth the other big elephant in the room is pricing it starts at just under
$1,000 and makes its way up into the $1,500 range by the time you put the
latest processor the available 64 gigs of RAM and up to 2 TB of storage in it
so cool yes the option that has a
keyboard down here also pretty cool that's a really neat form factor with
the ability to you know type passwords and stuff like that whenever it's inconvenient to use an on-screen
keyboard speaking of which I thought I pressed something earlier oh yeah there
you go this is rebound on screen keyboard by default okay so that's nice
really cool form factor very holdable
actually kind of like the ergonomics I wish this was a little bit more rounded
right here like it's a cool machine it's a cool factor it's a very complete
package it's got Wi-Fi 6E it's got a 120 HZ display that yeah is pretty good it's
just it's got a very challenging pricing
structure right now when you can get an Rog Ali Z1 extreme for like
$700 which is over $250 less and that's
at full price with those things going on promo either open box or brand new
fairly frequently so if you're super into the form factor there's a lot to
love here I mean the Ali doesn't have oculink that's pretty sick but if you're
not that into the form factor well I
wouldn't blame you it's really pocketable oh sort of as long as your
pockets are thick subscribe to the ShortCircuit