IO has been making cool but expensive handhelds for the last few years now and
the 3 is no exception. However, it's got
one cool trick. Magic freaking modules,
baby. These things are so cool. You've got two little things here and you just
pop them out and you put new ones in. You don't want the thumb stick, you want
something else, boom, slap it on. You want a trackpad? Boom. Slap it on. You
want different AY buttons? Boom. Slap them on. Boom. It's modular and it's
pretty sweet. And this is the first time I'm actually going to look at it. So, I'm super excited because I am a
handheld owner. I have an ROG Ally and I love it. But this might replace it
because it looks freaking really cool
actually. And I haven't even like taken it out of the box. At the very top, we've got a nice handheld. It does
usually come with a protective film screen, but we've of course taken it off
before doing our testing. Is there anything else in here? It's a pretty big
box. We got a little Io card. We've just got a bunch of
instructions and probably a warranty card in here. We got to take a look at
what else is in the box. Under our warranty card, we've got three smaller
boxes. I love smaller boxes. It's like one of those Russian nesting dolls. Uh
it comes with a 65 watt charger. However, during our testing, we did
notice that on the charge session, it was only pulling about 42 watts. Not
sure if it's just because of early production models or some weird bypass
mode was enabled, but something to be aware of. What else is in the box? We've
got adapter. More adapters. All right. So,
you're good to go no matter what plug you've got at home. And then this final
box is I'm guessing a cable. This a nice USBC cable. C to shining C. I might say
it's uh probably about 5 ft. This thing looks super sick. It comes in three
different colorways. We've got the black one. Kind of wish we had retro, but
that's all right. Analog Hall effect triggers, Hall effect
joysticks. Buttons feel actually pretty good. And I mean, I can swap these
apparently. I haven't done it yet. I'm really excited to like pop these in and
out. See how easy it is to actually change one on the fly. We've got an
Oculink port at the top here. We've got USB 4 on the top and bottom. So, no
matter how you want to charge, easy enough. Uh, and then it looks like we've
also got a micro SD card slot on the bottom here. So, you want to add some
extra storage. Boom. Easy. and you're probably going to want to because it can
come with up to four terabytes on board, but uh it costs a lot of money. We'll
talk about that later. As for just fit and finish, it's otherwise pretty cool.
This whole top appears to be glass, which looks really good until I touch it
with my fingers, which like it's a handheld, so you're going to be kind of doing that all the time. It's already
super smudged up here, but if you keep it in pristine condition, then I mean,
hey, it looks sexy. And then last but not least, we've got a 3 and 12 mm
headphone jack here if you don't want to use Bluetooth like me. Uh, and then
actually what's cool is the two speaker grills are like kind of in integrated
into the glass, I guess. Overall, it's pretty cool. It honestly feels like
regular comfortable. I wouldn't say it's the most comfy handheld I've ever had.
Um, but it doesn't dig into my palms or anything. These are like super rounded
and soft edges on the bottom here. And I actually might use the buttons on the
back for once. I don't normally I typically just ignore everything on the
back except for the four shoulder buttons, but uh these are kind of nicely
placed so they're really accessible to your kind of like ring fingers. The
weight's not too bad. It's only got a 49wh hour battery, which compared to
like an Alli X with 80 W hours, it's a
lot less, but it's a little more than a regular Ally at 40. So that's not awful.
Um and then what are these? What are these switches? What do those do? Oh,
that's super cool. So you can actually change how much the trigger depth is by
just kind of toggling these. Whether you want to go full force or you want to pop
them up and just go, you know, little micro presses. If you buy it out of the box, it's going to come like this with
these two guys here installed. But if you want more modules, you can buy some.
And you know what? I love the Steam Deck trackpad. And the one thing I don't like
about my Ally is it doesn't have trackpads on it. So let's let's try that. Let's try them
out. Whoa, these are cool. And then if
you want to just take him out, you go to space and you click the one-click
pop-up. What
the That's some of the coolest I've ever seen. What the They've just got like
little pogo pins on the bottom here to interface with uh these pins here. That
makes sense. What do I want to use? These are two D-pads. So, I don't want a
D-pad. Let me go with this D-pad here. I just pop it in. Okay, that was easy. And
then I want a fighting stick six button
layout. Okay, I can see in the software here
that it's changed to hall sensing joystick membrane switch 8-way button,
which yeah, looks correct. Oh, let me go back in the software. Hold on. There we
go. And then it changed to membrane micro switchight buttons, which is like
that was easy. It I literally pressed a button, popped them out, popped the new
ones in, it detected right away. Um, super simple. I'm actually really
impressed. But I don't really want to use these. So, let's uh try some other ones.
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llink today. But I really want to try the nice D-pad they got here and uh the
trackpad I was talking about earlier. And it's done. Wow, that's so
quick. It's actually really cool. And I actually really like this case. Like
this is, you know, if I put all these back, um, nothing's going to get
damaged. This is like a hard plastic case. You'd have to like really step on
this thing to mess it up. And if you don't like the black case, they got a
white one for you. There's nothing in here, but they include the case. So,
sure, I'll take some extra plastic. Another super cool trick, all these face
buttons, you can reorganize them. You don't like be being over there, you want
it on the bottom, take it out and swap it. Okay, let's play a game and actually
try out the touchpad. I got to say, one thing I'm not a huge fan of is some of
the button placement. Um, I don't like going down here onto the bottom for my
start and select kind of options, hamburger button stuff. This just feels
weird. Like, oh, I want to pause the game. Boom. Let me just like completely change how I'm holding the console to
hit that button. I don't like it. I space. You're not going to use it as
frequently, so I don't really mind that it's down at the bottom, but to each their own. Just playing Returnal here.
1080p low, and it's actually handling it
pretty well. This thing's got a Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 in it, which is too many
characters for a CPU, but you know what? It's pretty solid. Um, we actually
tested better performance at lower wattage than the Alli X with the Z1
Extreme. The other option, because you can get this with a different CPU, you
can get it with an 8840U, which is pretty on par with the Z1 Extreme. So,
you're going to get what you pay for in terms of performance. You will be paying more for the HX 370, but at just about
every wattage, it actually seems to do pretty well. So, maybe you want that.
There's no real other options in the handheld space for something better than
an 8840U or a Ryzen Z1 Extreme. Another
big skew that you can choose from with this device is OLED versus LCD. The LCD
is going to have variable refresh rate, but it's pretty much worse in every
other way. OLED just has incredible motion pixel response time. So, I'd
probably stick with this, which is the OLED. I got to say, the force feedback,
it's a little loud. It feels good in my hands. It's like it's kind of a nice
like gentle rumble, but it doesn't sound very gentle uh out loud. The trackpad
works. I don't like it for shooters, but I can confirm it's looking around. Is my
camera well hitched a little bit, but like honestly, the performance is pretty
rock solid and it looks good. And as for display testing for brightness, this
thing did do over the claimed 800 nits of around 1,000 in both SDR and HDR. And
then on top of that, it reached about 750 nits in full screen. So that's it's
a small screen, but that's still pretty impressive, especially for OLED. Man,
this thing does look really good. I've been told it sounds really good. So I
want to find out for myself. I space is usually pretty good. Um, but this is one
of those instances where it's being kind of annoying. And I don't know what's be if it's because of the modular
controllers or whatever. But I mean, you can see me like I can turn it down no
problem, but then up it's just not registering. So I'm going to use the
touchcreen and just crank this slider. I mean, I say that and then I can't slide
it. There we go. There's some kinks to work out. And I'm not saying that every
other handheld is perfect, but Windows on a handheld does typically work a
little bit better than that. Is space is okay. Um, but yeah, now I've got audio
turn on. Oh, there's RGB mode. Where's the RGB? Show me the RGB. Oh, it's on
the thumb stick. That is
good.
Yo, these have no these speakers have no
right to be this good. Let me turn down a little bit. Let me turn down a little
bit. So, this is 44% volume. This sounds great. Honestly, the only time I'd ever
use my headphones for this is if I'm like on the go, on the train, playing in
the living room while someone's watching TV, you know, something like that. Cuz
these are this probably the best speakers on a handheld I've ever heard.
I typically have an RG Ally, so I'm using Armory Crate, which has its own
problems, but for the most part, it does just kind of work. I haven't had any
issues where like buttons aren't controlling different sliders and stuff.
The navigation also seems typically pretty easy. Oh, now it's working. There
we go. Okay. But it's going in like bursts. You see that? Like that's just
weird. This is a pre-production model. The software's probably not quite
done. There might be some updates to fix these things, but uh I wish it would
just kind of work on its own out of the box. Otherwise, you know, settings are
pretty typical. You got like airplane mode, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi on, off. One
thing to note is that this does have three different power modes. Uh, and one
big difference actually from previous IEOS is that you can't adjust how much
RAM gets allocated to VRAM. You can only stick with the 4 gigs, which probably
explains why our ROG Ally actually beat this thing when testing Grid Legends.
Previous IO you could map up to, I think, 8 gigs. And that was pretty
sweet, especially at 1080p when you're not playing 720 and you want to like
actually take advantage of the really nice 144 hertz OLED display. I will say
the controller stuff with the magic modules that just worked. It did seem to
autodetect it without any issues at all. I like the little visual indication to
show which modules you have on there. So, frankly, as long as they just keep
kind of like patching it a little bit. One thing that's actually really nice that I just noticed while scrolling
through the menu is it's got these Windows options down here like device
manager, task manager, control panel. Those are actually really handy to have
at your fingertips, especially stuff like display settings. It might get mad
at me now because I'm in a game. Okay, but you know, when that happens, you
know, you're on a handheld, just swipe up, close window. It's not that
complicated. I get that everyone loves Steam OS and it is pretty good. Uh, but
I personally find Windows on a handheld to be totally usable and hopefully it
gets a little better. The only thing that really bugs me with my allies is that sometimes it like doesn't go to
sleep properly, then the battery is gone. Uh, which is kind of a bit of a
downside of this guy, the battery being only 49 watt hours. I get it. They don't
want to pack more battery in to make it heavier or to make it thicker or to make
it uncomfortable in any way. But like when a lot of the competition is up into
80 W hours, which is quite a while, that's really good. When this thing is
pushed to the limit at the highest power setting, uh, brightness turned up,
you're going to get about an hour of gaming done. We only got 40 minutes of
stress test. We only got 41 minutes in our stress test when everything's
cranked. Like, that's pretty rough. I get that you're going to turn the sound down. You're going to turn the screen
brightness down. Maybe you'll turn the wattage down a couple notches, but uh
yikes. Especially when you compare to an RG Alli X, which doesn't cost as much as
one of these guys, that's got almost 2 hours worth of gaming off of the wall.
You're not getting that here. And it's uh it's a bit of a shame. And if you
want to push it a bit more, maybe you're on a long car trip and you need the battery to last all day, it's not going
to. It'll do about 6 hours with everything set to low. And the Alli X
measures almost 13. I'm not sitting here
trying to say, "Oh, go buy an LAX." They've got their own problems. I'm not
getting into that. And I will say it's super freaking cool to have this
incredible, beautiful OLED display and these super modular controllers. But
let's talk about the price because it's really, really cool, but it's really,
really expensive. Retail price for the base model 8840U starry black, 16 gigs
of RAM, 512 gigs of storage, $8.99. And
then that goes all the way up to $13.99
with the 64 gigs of RAM and two terabytes of storage. And then if you
want the HX370, you're starting at
$1,500 for the 32 gig 1 TB going all the
way up to $2,100 bucks for 64 gigs of
RAM, 4 TB of storage. To be fair, those top-end models on both the 8840U and the
HX370 do come with the module kit. However, if you want to buy them
separately, it's going to be about 140 bucks. So, it's a really tough pill to
swallow. That pill gets a little easier to swallow if you want to pre-order this
thing. On Indiegogo, there's early bird pricing and regular pricing, and that
knocks 200 bucks off if you get the early bird, maybe only a hundred if
you're just earlyish on Indiegogo. But the Alli X with 1 TB of storage costs
800 bucks, and a Steam Deck is like way cheaper than that. Even the Steam Deck
OLED. That being said, this thing is absolutely mind-blowingly sick when you
take into account the modular controllers and like if you want this
exact layout like I've got with the trackpad here and you want to change it the next day, this is your only option.
And so for you, it actually might be worth spending a few hundred more to get
something like this. And if you want to spend a bit more money and get the HX
370, that's going to be the best chip in handhelds, at least right now. It's
going to get an upgrade in a couple years. you know what chips do, but right
now this is the best. The best of the best. As for myself, I didn't upgrade
from the Ally to an Ally X. I just the battery, it's nice, but it was kind of
the only major upgrade aside from some uh slightly faster memory. But I'll be
frank, especially if I can sell my Ally for a bit and then buy like the base
model of this thing and then do some upgrading. I don't know how easy it is
to open and upgrade any of the internals. Uh the SSD is probably doable
at least. I'm tempted. I gotta say this
controller thing is so freaking cool.
Like if you like, who's ever seen this? Nobody. It's a world's first. Look at
this. Look at this. I can do it again. That's That's great. Like, who
doesn't? And you can like trick your friends. You can be like, "Oh my god, you broke my handheld. What
the I just don't think it ever gets old." I don't think it's going to ever
get old. Um, I do worry a little bit about like, you know, you do this a 100
times, maybe these start to wear out a little bit, but uh, I think overall this
is probably one of the coolest things
I've ever seen. Oh, I turned I put it in upside down and it detected it. What?
Yo, you can flip them upside down. Man,
this thing is so sick. That's got to be the absolute coolest thing I've ever
seen on a handheld device. But what do you guys think? Like, comment, subscribe
on the video. Uh, tell us in the comments and check out the next one that
I do. I don't know when it'll be yet because I don't know the future.