The Abxylute 3D One has loads going for it. It's intriguing, powerful and immersive for a handheld, fully featured, configurable and more. But it's also pretty flawed. Its key feature, the glasses-free 3D tech, doesn't really add up, the battery life is pretty bad, and the price and compromised portability have you wondering whether a much more powerful gaming laptop wouldn't be a far better idea.
Large, crisp immersive display
Glasses-free 3D tech isn't compelling
Poor battery life and portability
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It's busy and crowded out there in the world of handheld gaming PCs . If you want to stand out, what you need is some kind of unique feature. Hummm. How about the world's first glasses-free 3D handheld PC? We give you the Abxylute 3D One .
Actually, this huge handheld has quite a bit more going for it than just the glasses-free 3D stuff. For this class of device, the 10.95-inch IPS display is pretty monstrous. Then there's the modular construction with detachable controllers, kick-stand and a keyboard. Oh and it's all powered by an Intel Lunar Lake chip, in this case the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V complimented by 32 GB of memory.
The real novelty is, of course, the glasses-free 3D tech. Abxylute describes it as, "electronic parallax barrier technology, the most mature and reliable form of glasses-free 3D tech today to balance brightness, tracking, and viewing comfort." But I think it amounts to essentially the same approach as seen in various glasses-free 3D monitors.
That includes the Acer Predator SpatialLabs View 27 I reviewed last year, which uses lenticular lenses and eye-tracking cameras. The Abxylute 3D One does indeed have tracking cameras at the top of the display and the resulting visual experience is very much the same as that Acer monitor, albeit in a smaller scale. But hold that thought, there are a few other issues to attend to.
(Image credit: Future) Actually, it's an open question as to whether you'd really want to use the glasses-free 3D tech at all. Part of the problem is performance. Abxylute has decided to go with a 2,560 by 1,600 resolution screen for the 3D One. With most handhelds, you'd have the option of running at lower, non-native resolutions where performance is marginal. But not on the Abxylute 3D One. Not if you want to use the 3D tech, anyway.
According to Abxylute, using a non-native screen resolution will, "disrupt the 3D interlacing and cause depth distortion." A simpler version is that it really doesn't work at all at non-native resolutions.