The Tokyo Game Show 2025 was yet another good event to check how the PC handheld market is shaping up. Every booth was chasing the specs and trying to differentiate themselves with specific features. We have a short video if you want a quick overview before jumping in more details afterwards.

Let’s start with OneX Player.

OneX Player: Tablets and Handhelds

OneX Player has long positioned itself as the “hybrid” of the handheld world. At TGS they were showcasing three models that demonstrated a strong intent to be different.

X1 Air – The All‑Purpose Tablet

The X1 Air looks like a 10‑inch tablet, but its detachable side‑mounted gamepads turn it into an instant console. Because the controller attachment is modular, you can also ditch the pads and use the device as a regular tablet or attach a keyboard to get a laptop‑like experience.

To be fair it feels a little bulky and cumbersome when you use it as a gaming device. It’s just a bit much. Note that this is not super new as they had something similar last year in 2024. It runs on Windows.

Fly F1 Pro – The “Mini Steam Deck”

The Fly F1 Pro feels like a scaled‑down Steam Deck with a 7‑inch OLED display with a 144Hz refresh rate. Not sure how often you are going to hit the 144Hz anyway apart from 2D titles, since the AMD APU they use are powerful, but nothing revolutionary.

Again no trackpad. But that’s expected. Also, runs only on Windows.

Sugar One – The Dual‑Screen Emulation Hub

The Sugar 1 is the most radical of the trio. Built around a Snapdragon G3 Gen3 chip and running Android 14, it features two screens that can be positioned independently, as well as the controllers that can move up or down depending on how you’d like to play.

This auto‑reconfiguration is especially useful for emulation: classic Nintendo DS games can use one screen for gameplay while the second shows a map or HUD. For other games, you can use the second screen as a chat client, or a web browser. Interesting concept, but it’s going to be fairly limited since it does not have a X86 chip.

GPD: Mini PCs for your Hands

GPD’s reputation as a mini‑PC pioneer was on full display at TGS. Their three new models illustrate how they’re pushing the envelope in terms of form factor and performance.

GPD Win Max 2

The Win Max 2 is an all‑in‑one mini-PC that combines a keyboard, integrated gamepads (with optional covers for discretion), and a slim chassis.

It barely fits the category of handhelds, but that’s still how GPD wants you to see it. Once you are done editing your long Powerpoint presentation, just grab this device by the gamepads and relax why holding the unit up. For me, this feels like the OneX Player 10 inches tablet, if not a little worse. It runs on Windows, but typically you don’t have to wait too long to see GPD supported on Linux as well (by the community).

Win 5 – The “Mini Steam Deck” with a Powerhouse Processor

The Win 5 adopts the familiar Steam Deck‑style design but swaps in AMD’s Ryzen AI Max chip - essentially the same APU that powers the Framework desktop! This gives it a huge edge in raw performance: You can look at our article related to gaming on the Framework Desktop to understand how much of a big deal this is.

This machine can run Cyberpunk 2077 at 60 fps, high details, no problem. The trade‑off is battery life - the Ryzen AI Max series were never made for handhelds, and this is going to show in terms of power consumption. So either you have to attach it to an external battery, or be happy if you can get one hour of gaming on it. I think I saw then attach a specific external battery they made for the back of the unit, to extend the session playtime… that seems like a strange design decision.

Win Mini – Tiny and Functional

The Win Mini is the most compact of the lineup. Its clamshell design houses a keyboard and 2 gamepads. This time it’s mostly made for gaming, while you could MAYBE use the keyboard to fix the Powerpoint presentation we mentioned earlier, but certainly not make it from scratch unless you like to hit your head against the walls.

But having a keyboard is very nice for old hardware emulation, for typing emails, chatting, and browsing in general. Remninds me of the excellent Open Pandora Linux handheld. Good times.

MSI’s Return with the A8

MSI learned from its first handheld experience (the MSI Claw) and returned stronger. The new Claw A8 replaces the Intel‑based processor with AMD’s Z2 Extreme, which delivers much better performance compared to whatever crap Intel’s iGPU can deliver.

Now it makes it into a me-too product compared to the ROG Ally, but that’s better than being a worse product. I don’t think they have much chance on this market, they were barely advertising it on their booth.

R.O.G.’s Xbox Ally – The Hot Handheld of 2025

R.O.G., the flagship gaming brand of Asus, showcased its upcoming Xbox Ally in two variants: a standard model and a X edition featuring the AMD Z2 Extreme chip. It will hit the market in mid-October 2025 in most countries around the world, and it will be priced at 600 USD for the standard model and 1000 USD for the X model. Ouch, that’s pretty expensive, and it’s not obvious at first why the 1000 USD model is a much better deal than the 800 USD ROG Ally X.

The Z2 Extreme is a newer processor, but based on current benchmarks it seems to be only marginally superior in performance to the Z1 Extreme. Instead, the whole purpose of this rebranding is to have the weight of Microsoft behind the hardware, and a new UI that should make things easier and more intuitive, as well as a proper GamePass integration.

Market Outlook – Where Handheld PCs Are Headed

The handheld PC market is clearly moving into the premium price bracket. So you end up with the Nintendo Switch 2 and the Steam Deck (at least the cheaper models) at the 400~500 USD price range, and then it goes very quickly in the 1000 USD range, or more. Despite the increasing prices, there is no breakthrough in performance at this stage (unless you consider the AI Max on the GPD Win 5, but that comes with serious drawbacks as mentioned), and it’s likely that they won’t really expand the market much for the time being. I would expect things to change a bit once the next generation of AMD chips come around - one or 2 years later?

Another option down the road is to move to a proper ARM SOC, a la Apple. Currently there are viable ARM chips for raw CPU performance, but very few that offer compelling GPU capabilities.

But things can change fast, and solutions like FEX and Box64 are just waiting for the proper hardware to make running demanding Steam games on a handheld ARM device a reality.

In any case, the market and the offering does not seem to be shrinking, and ROG seems well positioned to remain in a dominant position on the Windows handhelds category.