I've been playing with the 'world's first' glasses-free 3D handheld PC and my early impressions are that the $1,500 Abxylute 3D One is absolutely huge, annoyingly clunky and a little bit silly

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.

That uses a combination of eye-tracking cameras and lenticular lenses to effective "send" a slightly different image to each eye, thus creating the illusion of 3D visual depth. I'm sure it's the same approach with the Abxylute 3D One. And just like that Acer monitor, the results here are mixed, to say the least.

The 3D effect does work, but as on the Acer monitor, it looks much better viewing a single 3D model in, say, a graphic design context, than it does in games. Baldur's Gate III is one of the titles Abxylute highlights as supported, but in practice it's awfully clunky.

For want of a better term, the way the 3Dness in the scene in mapped is very patchy. So, some objects have 3D depth, others don't, while yet more seem to be "painted" onto 3D depth that doesn't quite match the actual shape of the object being rendered.

Then there's the performance. While I won't draw final conclusions here, my first stab at enabling the 3D effect in Baldur's Gate III absolutely hammered performance to truly unplayable slideshow levels. That might be fixable with settings tweaks. But my initial impression is that the glasses-free 3D functionality will only be usable in games that are very undemanding.

The broader experience is also hopelessy clunky. You must run any game through a special launcher to ensure full 3D support. But it's not entirely transparent whether the game is running properly, or in the case of Baldur's Gate, there's something wrong and the game was running in the alternative "2D-to-3D universal conversion" mode that's available for unsupported apps.

Likewise, games must be run at the screen's full 2,560 by 1,600 native res for optimal support, which is hardly ideal for an integrated GPU, and the device comes with a firm warning not to update the graphics driver for fear of causing instability issues. All told, it's a million miles from a usable experience, let alone seamless.

Actually, maybe it could work quite well with, I dunno, emulated Nintendo 3DS games? But if that's really all this thing is good for, get yourself a 3DS and save a whole hill of cash is the tempting conclusion.

All of which isn't to say this thing is unremittingly awful. The screen is pretty nice (2,560 by 1,600 resolution, 480 nits, 120 Hz), first impressions are of decent build quality, the controllers are OK, the connectivity is decent and so on. But the size and the utility of that glasses-free 3D tech are both major potential flaws on early viewing.

Oh and the price. I forgot to mention the price. Abxylute says the retail price for the 3D One is a scarcely credible $1,799. OK, the early bird price on Kickstarter will be $1,499 and if you sign up for a "VIP reservation", you'll pay $1,449. But, still, this is intergalactic money for a gaming handheld.

Right now on our best gaming laptop deals page, you can snag an MSI Vector 16 HX AI with Nvidia's RTX 5070 Ti mobile GPU for $1,499. And let's be absolutely clear. An RTX 5070 Ti mobile will absolutely obliterate this handheld for raw rendering performance.

Anywho, let's just say the Abxylute 3D One has plenty to prove. Watch this space.

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2. Best budget:
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3. Best Windows:
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4. Best big screen:
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5. Best compact:
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