steam deck's been delayed now what am I
gonna do to play games on the go Gamepad digital's got the answer the GPD XP it's
an Android device that promises to be everything modern gaming phones can be
at a significantly lower price of Entry but it's not phone and it's got a parlor
trick that valve never thought to pull
haha it's got swappable controls but
unlike the steam deck it's not a Mini PC so what can you do with it and does it
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this thing is basically half switch half phone with swappable controls and
bizarrely dual 4G sim card slots at
first glance you'd be forgiven for thinking it's like the Rog phone but no
only the right section comes off the left section is part of the chassis so
thankfully it doesn't do voice calls or we'd be one step away from a Nokia
engage Taco phone situation data access does make sense since GPD is marketing
this as a way to play mobile games including first person shooters to
achieve that the removal controls aren't just for show the right side can either
be blanked off to become a great answer to lead your team to victory in mobile
games fit in with a traditional thumbstick and button controls for
emulators and streamed console games or replaced with a five button hotkey
cluster the GPD says is ideal for first-person shooters that might not
look too intuitive but the idea is that you can aim with your thumb on the
touchscreen and use these buttons for utility features the buttons feel
characteristically good for a GPD product and compared to smaller
handhelds like the retroid pocket 2 and Amber neck rg351m the sticks are much
nicer feeling they're the same as the GPD win 3. true to gpd's Roots all
controller modules can switch between Xbox mode or touch simulator mode via a
dedicated button next to the thumbstick
but enough about controls the device itself is running Android 11 with gpd's
very not inspired by Microsoft Metro UI and yes they actually call it Metro
that's a lot newer than the Android 6 you'll find on the retroid pocket 2 or
Android 7 on the previous gen GPD XD plus and helps to make it relevant for
more than just retro Gamers that's why it's so strange that GPD chose a
mediatek helio g95 SOC which is well
below upcoming competitors like the iron Odin and ktr1 which both sport the far
more capable Snapdragon 845 it's going to have the drive of a 60hz 1080p tall
IPS display which they call Sunshine screen it's not super premium and it has
a lot of ips glow but it's reasonably bright and wouldn't get a place on a
mid-range smartphone unlike one of those it's got an integrated active cooling
fan that should hopefully prevent throttling over longer sessions and with
that very mid-range SOC the chonky 7000
milliamp hour battery just by giving some serious endurance the biggest
Flagship smartphones typically ship with 5 000 milliamp hours or less with
brighter screens and much more power hungry socs in fact it dropped less than
20 percent from Full over an hour of gameplay in Super Mario Sunshine
there's 128 gigs of ufs storage on board
with the ability to swap one of the Nano Sims for a Micro SD card you could
theoretically expand it even further with the USB type-c port if it could be
relied upon to grip the cable look it falls right out
thankfully you definitely won't be filling up your storage using the hole
punch camera at 5 megapixels it's primarily marketed for video calls which
is better than nothing for I guess you'd probably prefer to use a real smartphone
for that but I'm not your mom if I was I'd tell you to buy a water bottle from
ltdstore.com and stay hydrated more easily with the new caps I won't be
around to take care of you forever the speakers would normally be unremarkable
on a handheld like this but these are supplied by AAC Technologies a Chinese
company who happens to be the supplier that Apple uses and these are in fact
double coil speakers and well they're
remarkably clear but an iPhone this is not
there's no base just mids in trouble great for phone calls but none of the
included arcade titles are being done Justice here you'd think there'd be more
space for resonant Chambers in here let's take it apart and see for
ourselves the screws are all Phillips and all the
same size that is to say quite tiny there's a few Clips too but once it's
off check out the size of that battery
there's the active cooler and hey the sticks on a separate PCB just like the
steam deck get subscribed by the way because if it's not clear by now we're
definitely doing more content on the steam deck and you won't want to miss it down here are the speakers they're not
tiny but they're not huge either there's definitely enough room in here for
larger resonance Chambers if they tried oh well let's button it back up and play
some games the built-in Neo Geo game seem to work pretty well although that's
to be expected input lag seems pretty low as well and the controls feel
responsive as we come to expect from GPD devices even in the games that don't
ship with the console while the dolphin Gamecube Emulator is one of the pre-installed apps it's not quite
running at full speed you will get the full 30fps most of the time in Super
Mario Sunshine for example but Shader compilation and some special effects
will bring the game's FPS down to the high single digits to say nothing of
more complex titles what's worse the version of dolphin
included with the device doesn't make use of the controllers so you need to
map the touch inputs manually the PSP emulator on the other hand does work
with controller natively and runs reliably at 2x upscale often even at the
native 1080p resolution of the handheld although it does drop frames here and
there if you do that but this isn't primarily marketed for emulation the
Amber Nixon retroids of the world are much cheaper and already do a good job
of that GPD spins this as a console for modern mobile games and pubg mobile and
Minecraft are good candidates for the additional controllers but while setting
up the touch control simulator isn't difficult for these and there's very
little if any delay frame rates aren't great we're getting 30 or 40 FPS in pubg
at best and in Minecraft's default settings frame rate fluctuates between
60 and what looks like somewhere in the 30s depending on what you're looking at
regardless of the graphic settings if you're willing to reduce the draw
distance below the default of 20 you might actually be able to get a solid
60fps speaking of FPS woes the FPS
module bizarrely places the trigger lower down on the grip than a standard
controller which will take some getting used to it's kind of like if a Dreamcast
controller also had shoulder buttons but there's there's less to grip
but I do the traditional controller grip while comfortable is already a little
bit on the smaller side so the FPS module ends up being painful for me to
use for any length of time and that's not the only issue here the flat cap let
me grab this real quick to kind of show you what's going on here
normally these controls what they do is slide directly on and off of this rail
here it takes a fair bit of force to get that off by the way this flat cap is
exactly what it sounds like it is flat and it just flops on there like that
with the magnets there's nothing here
normally there's like something like this this here covers this but there's
nothing there and so visually and like
in terms of feel this is really distracting to me not only that
but these grips are not easy to align normally what I
want to do what I'm putting this together is like kind of get in like
that to kind of get it into the the hole properly then slide it into place but if
you do that what's going to happen is you're going to have a little bit of a
lip on the console itself between the controller and the console and that
actually makes it more difficult to take this off what you're supposed to do is
line it up very carefully so that the tabs get into those rails and then push
it together and even then sometimes you'll get mixed results this time I got
it 100 but your mileage may vary very
dramatically here oh and while we're talking about weird control issues the
hardware Android buttons are in fact uh
labeled backwards oops which encapsulates the overall experience
pretty well you're losing a more powerful soc for a big battery you're
losing a cohesive experience like you get with an Amber neck for a more
versatile Android UI you're gaining bulk for swappable controls and while the
build quality is solid you're going to pay a premium for it over those other
devices is it worth it to be able to play mobile games on a secondary device
as someone who doesn't play competitive mobile games
I can't say but as someone who daily
drove a PSP for years and years I can say that the emulation capabilities are
promising but at around 350 dollars
it's not a big leap to 3.99 for an entry-level steam deck a handheld that
can do all this and run PC games albeit with lower battery life when that
console finally launches these premium Android handhelds may not be able to
compete unless pwning players with smartphones is your jam our sponsors
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necessary thanks for watching guys you're probably hoping for More Steam
deck content and um this wasn't it so go
check out our reaction to the steam decks here now to see just what this boy's got to contend with going forward