I've Been Playing With The 'world's First' Glasses-free 3d Handheld...

This 11-inch 'handheld' PC is bigger than my laptop...

Weary-eyed, desiccated, seen-it-all cynicism is something of an occupational hazard for a hackneyed hardware reviewer such as I. But just occasionally something lands on your desk that's genuinely surprising. And the Abxylute 3D One, a new glasses-free 3D handheld gaming PC, is just such a device. But maybe for all the wrong reasons.

We'll have a full review in due course. However, the literal out-of-the-box experience with this Kickstarter-funded device is worth a few immediate impressions. This handheld is extraordinary by several measures. First up, it's absolutely massive. The screen is 11 inches. But it comes with a centimetre-plus of bezel all round, plus a pair of huge clip-on controllers.

The upshot of which is that the Abxylute 3D One pretty much dwarfs the laptop on which I'm typing these words. It's so big I have serious reservations about how realistic it is as an actual handheld device. I'm not sure I'd want to game with this beast in my actual hands for very long.

Moreover, the comparison between gaming handhelds and gaming laptops is often unflattering, in performance terms, for the former. But the idea is that in return for compromised performance, handhelds give you dramatic advantages in terms of portability and gaming ergonomics.

The ergonomics are debatable when it comes to the Abxylute 3D One. But the portability ain't. This huge "handheld" really isn't any more portable than a thin-and-light 14-inch gaming laptop. And a 14-inch laptop with a proper discrete GPU is always going to be more powerful than a handheld with an APU that relies on integrated graphics.

In this case, it's Intel's Lunar Lake (the 258V model, if you are interested), which is a very nice APU. But it's still an APU with an iGPU that will get blown away by even the most basic discrete GPU.

Then there's the glasses-free 3D display. Abxylute inevitably doesn't exactly go into forensic detail with the precise display technology implemented, describing it as a "naked-eye 3D display" with eye tracking. But I'm pretty confident is uses the same technology as other glasses-free LCDs we've seen of late, including the Acer Predator SpatialLabs View 27 I reviewed earlier this summer.

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That uses a combination of eye-tracking cameras and lenticular lenses to effective "send" a slightly different image to each eye, thus

Source: PC Gamer