This Steam Deck competitor can turn into a tiny laptop

It’s a good time to be a fan of portable gaming PCs. The concept of handheld PC gaming has been around for years, but the arrival of the Steam Deck has caused a Cambrian explosion in designs for this form factor. Take the OneXPlayer 2 Pro, for example: This awkwardly-named handheld looks like a typical Steam Deck competitor. But in just a few seconds you can snap off the side controllers, a la the Nintendo Switch, and add a fold-down keyboard to turn it into a tiny Surface-style tablet or laptop.

One-Netbook

The idea appears to be giving the handheld form factor more conventional utility. The physical design is mostly inherited from the previous model, the OneXPlayer 2 (sans Pro), which super-sized the usual portable design with an 8.4-inch, 2560×1600 screen and room for more powerful components like a full 80mm-long M.2 SSD. That larger screen also makes the keyboard size closer to the mini-laptop form factor that’s popular in Asia, though it’s still far smaller than standard key sizes. With the controllers removed, the design can function as a small tablet with stylus input or dock to a television and let you play with a controller bracket, again, very much like the Nintendo Switch.

The upgraded Pro model is really taking no prisoners in terms of specs. It’s using a Ryzen 7 7840U as its basis, which (as Liliputing notes) is very similar to the beefed-up RDNA 3 chip in the Asus ROG Ally. It can also be configured with up to 64GB of RAM and 4TB of storage space — specs that would make a top-of-the-line gaming desktop green with envy.

Oh, and if A Cruel Angel’s Thesis is running through your head right now, don’t worry. The green-on-orange color scheme of the OneXPlayer 2 Pro is indeed licensed with the Neon Genesis Evangelion anime and is fashioned after the EVA-01 mech unit. There’s no price or launch date for the OneXPlayer 2 Pro attached to its announcement. But you can make an educated guess as to the eventual MSRP since the previous Ryzen 6000-based OneXPlayer 2 starts at $1249 (now on sale for $999).