OneXPlayer X1 Air review

It’s a gaming tablet that’s difficult to love, and yet it’s there If definitely things I like about the latest Intel-powered OneXPlayer gaming tablet. Lunar Lake performs very, very well in tablet form, and its Arc 140V GPU is truly impressive when it comes to gaming performance. Then there’s that gorgeous, glowing 11-inch display.

But it’s also bloody unstable with weird bugs, and despite the main reason for its existence being that it’s supposedly a versatile 3-in-1 device, it definitely fails to convince in almost any of those formats.

Like the older, Meteor Lake-based OneXPlayer X1, it’s a device designed to function as a standard (albeit very hefty) tablet PC, resembling a laptop thanks to its magnetically attached keyboard and touchpad, and as a handheld gaming PC with a pair of clip-on controllers. And inevitably, this desire for flexibility makes each option challenging in different ways.

I really hoped that things would be different this time, but I feel like OneXPlayer hasn’t learned the lessons from the original device and is determined to make the same mistakes. Although perhaps this pursuit of versatility means that avoiding these mistakes is simply impossible. Either way, I don’t love it.

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The OneXPlayer X1 Air is probably best when used as an 11-inch laptop with an attached keyboard. Although the form factor inevitably makes it slightly less useful than actual An 11-inch laptop would be. As always with things like this – think Microsoft’s Surface tablets – the problem is that they definitely suck when used on my knees. You really miss your laptop, don’t you?

This is due to the lack of a hinge, as all components are necessarily behind the screen, and the keyboard section is little more than some inputs on a faux leather flap. Any ergonomic stiffness therefore has to come from the petite stand on the back of the tablet, and this will never provide comfort or decent tablet employ time away from the desk.

However, it is actually surprisingly effective on the desk. The Flappy keyboard, like the previous version, is prone to bending, which can be a bit distracting, but the keyboard switches have more travel than many actual laptop keyboards. Typing on it is very comfortable, the spacing between the keys is enormous which means you don’t make many mistakes, and the trackpad is impressively responsive.

All in all, this makes a good copy of the notebook as long as you don’t intend to employ it in a place where a stand won’t work. Although this chassis has been significantly improved over the last generation X1 as this time it is actually integrated into the chassis. Previously, it was just another magnetically attached accessory – again finished in faux leather – and made the device seem even thicker than it already was.

Now it’s a full-width metal stand, built into the tablet itself. It is both versatile in terms of placement and has impressive structural rigidity. However, you can’t actually employ it in portrait mode unless you want the X1 Air to stand vertically at a 90° angle to the tabletop.

But you probably won’t employ it in portrait mode very often, as it seems to lack auto-rotation capabilities. In fact, the latest Windows 11 update appears to have completely removed the rotate option from quick settings. I can, of course, still go into Windows Settings and change the panel orientation whenever I want to switch between modes – for example, if I want to read a comic book or a specific website – but this is not a user-friendly option, especially when the previous OneXPlayer tablet had no such problems.

So it’s not as great as a tablet? How about a portable gaming PC? Well, frustratingly, the performance is really good, but the experience is definitely not. The 140V Arc iGPU in the Lunar Lake Core Ultra 7 258V is excellent and delivers gaming performance that is sometimes on par with the best Strix Point chips, and sometimes even better.

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I’ll admit I was hoping the battery life would be better, but at full speed on the PC Mark Gaming Battery Life test I only saw 103 minutes with the X1 Air. I’m already familiar with OneXConsole and appreciate its detailed approach to providing control over device performance and power consumption. Although there If there are still segments (especially the software update section) that are definitely written in Chinese characters, and Windows itself also doesn’t like update packages, marking and removing them via Defender.

But the control that the OneXConsole software provides means you can really take advantage of the built-in performance of the Intel chip. Where Lunar Lake does well is in low power modes. I happily used it at 15W (basically half power), which makes a significant difference in gaming runtime while still providing decent performance.

Sounds pretty good so far. And that would be the case if the actual experience wasn’t an exercise in gaming and technical frustration. First of all, these detachable controllers are still terrible. They were bad on the original X1 and are no better with the X1 Air. They’re oddly hollow, the buttons don’t have a good feel, and they flex unpleasantly when inserted into the device. They If secure, but it’s difficult to shake the feeling that if you lie in bed and try to play on it, you’ll end up with a face full of a hefty Lunar Lake tablet.

Although you won’t be doing that, considering the importance of the whole thing. Where dedicated gaming notebooks – like the Steam Deck, ROG XBox Ally There’s no way to comfortably play this handheld for any length of time other than creating some kind of complicated bungee cord setup.

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And that pain was gone before the worms hit. It’s true that I didn’t encounter the same visual artifacts as with the Meteor Lake device and its immature drivers, but that doesn’t mean everything went smoothly. The first major issue I encountered was battery life testing, where I had to drain the juice from the X1 Air while gaming. Then the damn thing wouldn’t start even after plugging it in for a while.

This sort of yes, although nothing appeared on the screen, and I ended up having to go through some mysterious ritual of difficult resetting, charging, turning on the device until the power delicate came on (though nothing else was on), and then swapping the charger for another laptop charger to get some miscellaneous juice to it. And then just ignoring it for a few days before it finally started up again, surrounded by beeswax candles and centered in a pentagram.

It’s mostly working again now, although it requires a drop of virgin blood every time I plug it in. There’s still the occasional issue where you have to press the power button a few times before it actually boots up, and standby mode tends to be choppy as with any Windows device.

However, even without bugs, the entire package does not justify its price. The version I tested is technically priced at $1,499, but is currently marked down to $1,280. That’s money for an RTX 5070 gaming laptop, folks, and not money I’d be willing to spend on something that doesn’t excel in any of its three modes: laptop, tablet, or mobile.

Which means it’s an almost impossible recommendation on my part. I’ve been using the OneXPlayer X1 Air in various ways for a long time, and while there are improvements over the original X1 and I like some of its features (that screen…), I can’t in good conscience suggest that anyone spending over $1,200 will have a good time with it.

Especially when you can spend half that amount and buy the absolute best portable gaming PC, or the same amount and buy a real Lunar Lake laptop. Sure, you may be losing out on that versatility, but the compromises the X1 Air makes are just not worth it.

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