Gaming handhelds are in vogue, in case you haven’t noticed. From successes in the PC market like theSteam DeckandASUS ROG Ally, to the ever-brilliant Nintendo Switch, there are plenty to pick from.
One particularly interesting slice of the market is taken up by cloud gaming handhelds, though - slimmer, lighter and cheaper devices that don’t really run games natively, instead opting to host cloud gaming platforms. Abxylute offers one such option, and I’ve used it for a few weeks to see how it holds up.
abxylute handheld
This handheld has some real strong spots and offers a bunch of services in one place, but it’s a little challenging to use and is heavily limited by your service of choice.
Abxylute’s gaming handheld looks almost exactly like you’d imagine if you pictured a slim, slightly generic option in your mind’s eye. That’s not a terrible thing, though.
It’s nice and slim, far more so than a chunkier and more powerful handheld like the Steam Deck, and light enough to be basically no burden at all while you’re playing (it compares favourably to even a Switch on that front).
The device is also solid, with little to no flex to it and a well-built feel in the hand that makes it reassuring to use.
It doesn’t host any real extra buttons, so you get two joysticks, a d-pad, four face buttons and some menu keys, along with shoulder buttons and triggers, mirroring basically any standard controller.
This means no extra back buttons or trackpads, but I didn’t find that restrictive in any of the games I tested it with.
Those buttons are all solid and tactile, although the sticks are an interesting area. They’re hall-effect sticks, which means they should resist stick drift compared to more typical analogue sticks - however, in some intangible way, I don’t love the way they feel.
They’re not full-sized sticks like you’d get on a PlayStation DualSense, but that’s no issue on a Switch’s Joy-Con, whereas the Abxylute’s sticks are slightly stiffer and had me feeling like I’d lost just a little fine control.
In slower games that’s fine, but it made shooters and other fast-paced titles a little more finicky to play - this could be a matter of deadzones but was a drag nonetheless.
Still, the Abxylute is comfortable to hold and also comes with a welcome hard carrying case that’s ideal for storage and transport - a nice touch, especially given its reasonable pricing.
Performance and display
Where the Abxylute’s performance is concerned, there are really two key different areas. If you’re interested in its native gaming, you’re already probably in the wrong place.
It runs Android, and installing some mobile games like Call of Duty Mobile and Genshin Impact made it immediately clear that it’s just not built for local gaming - the games run badly and look worse.
The Abxylute also basically cannot multitask on any level; leaving one app to open another will almost always require you to close the first one, making swapping between things a little slow.
This is a cloud gaming machine, though, and that’s how I tested it for the vast majority of my time with it. Logging into various services was differing degrees of fiddly (I needed to download the Gmail app to click on verification emails in some cases, which didn’t run great) but once they were set up things got a lot better.
Whether it’s Xbox Game Pass orNvidia GeForce Now, once I connected and started playing the Abxylute fulfilled its brief solidly, with a good amount of control and a great display that’s big enough to make gaming really feasible.
I played a few hours ofBaldur’s Gate 3through GeForce Now and had no complaints - for a game with a lot of small text to navigate, that’s really impressive.
Since its display is 1080p, you really can get good detail if you’re on the right tier of a given service, but it’s worth saying that GeForce Now gave me by far the most stable and lag-free option.
Xbox’s cloud gaming platform might be well known, but it’s still prone to latency, and Halo Infinite wasn’t much fun at all - a challenge for Xbox, not Abxylute, I should stress.
A recent firmware update means that the handheld now works really nicely with PS Remote Play too, albeit with all the same potential connection hangups - even in the same room as my PS5 and with Google Nest Wi-Fi routers as my network, things were often flaky.
Resolution drops, image glitches and game-altering latency were all fairly regular occurences, but when it ran smoothly (and it did a decent chunk of the time) more sedate games were solid to play. Still, if Sony has any sort of propietary anti-lag advantage, Abxylute won’t be much competition for thePlayStation Portalwhen it launches later this year.
Battery life and features
The single biggest advantage that cloud gaming offers for handhelds (aside from storage space saved) is that it iswayless draining on a battery.
The Abxylute’s 5,200mAh battery is therefore enough to see it last over six hours while using a remote or cloud play app, something that Steam Deck owners could only dream of.
I found that to be a number it pretty consistently met, too, although that doesn’t mean all is rosy where its battery is concerned. The handheld comes with a USB-A to USB-C cable and a note saying that it won’t work with C-to-C cables.
That was proven in testing, and being limited to that cable meant for slow charging and the sort of annoying little hitch that means you have to keep hold of (or find) a charging brick that should be consigned to the past by now.
From a software point of view, the handheld uses Android 12 with a fairly decent custom UI slapped on top of it that shows you your most recent apps - much like a console home screen from Xbox or PlayStation.
This works fine and also gives you quick access to settings and such. Navigation was never much of a struggle, although my handheld did have a habit of turning off Wi-Fi completely when I left it off for a few hours, which could lead to some head-scratching moments when trying to launch a cloud game.
Abxylute has cooked up an interesting device with its handheld. It’s one of the best cloud gaming options on the market at the moment, I’d wager, but depending on your service of choice, and with the PlayStation Portal moving into view, that position might not last forever.
That even the best of the cloud gaming handhelds we’ve tried still feels regularly laggy in use is a marker of where the services are on average, too.
If you want PlayStation Remote Play, Xbox Cloud Gaming, Steam Link and Nvidia GeForce Now all in one place, though, there aren’t many other places you’ll manage it - as long as you can accept some wrinkles along the way.
