The picture above does not contain two different gaming handhelds. Instead, this halo device for Qualcomm’s just-announced Snapdragon G3 Gen 3 gaming chips — which I’ll tell you about in a sec — is a single transforming device with swing out gamepads and screens. It’s called the OneXPlayer OneXSugar, and it’s one of the most delightfully gadgety gaming gadgets I’ve seen.
Hold it horizontally like a Nintendo Switch or Steam Deck, flip out its secondary screen, then rotate its twin hinged gamepads for a more squared-off Nintendo DS-like experience:
If you listen closely, you can almost hear the emulation community jumping for joy at the idea of two different aspect ratio screens joined at the hip. Me, I’m busy imagining the satisfying and/or horrifying sounds it might make as its triple joints swing into action!
We know little more than what you can glean from the pictures and animations, but here are the key bits:
Before you get your hopes up, the OneXPlayer OneXSugar is unlikely to become a Windows gaming machine. For one thing, we’re looking at nice but modest gains of 30 percent more CPU performance and 28 percent more GPU performance than the Snapdragon G3x Gen 2 announced in 2023. It doesn’t contain the Oryon CPU core that powers both Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite for phones or its Snapdragon X Elite for laptops, nor the Adreno X1 or Adreno 830 GPUs that respectively feature in those chips.
And while Qualcomm Snapdragon gaming lead Micah Knapp told journalists that the company might launch support for other operating systems “over time,” it’s “really focused on the Android side” as of today. That’s because China is such a huge market for Android gaming, the company hints. “The perspective that Android gaming isn’t popular is a very region-centric perspective,” Qualcomm spokesperson Sascha Segan says when I ask.
That China interest is certainly helping produce some incredible looking devices. When Qualcomm first announced its last handheld gaming chips, the best it could show off was a dull batarang-shaped reference design. Today, in addition to the OneXSugar, it’s got the sleek metal-bodied Ayaneo Pocket S2, an Ayaneo Gaming Pad, and additionally two new Retroid Pocket devices on its new lower-tier chips, the Snapdragon G2 Gen 2 and G1 Gen 2.
Knapp tells me that his company doesn’t need to subsidize the development of Qualcomm handhelds, either. “To be blunt, most of them are coming to us to build platforms on their own,” he says. “People have accepted this is where things are going to happen, and now they’re just aggressively moving into the space,” he says.
Of the two lower-tier chips, the G2 Gen 2 claims significant gains of 2.3x the CPU performance and 3.8x the GPU performance of a Snapdragon G2 Gen 1, though I’m not aware of any particular handhelds shipping with that earlier chip, and neither Qualcomm nor Retroid have released images of its next horizontal handheld. The G1 Gen 2 boasts 80 percent greater CPU performance than G1 Gen 1, and a 25 percent faster GPU.
The Ayaneo Pocket S2 should be coming this month, the Retroid Pocket PR Classic should be up for preorder this month, and the Ayaneo Gaming Pad should be coming this May.
