The OneXSugar Sugar 1 was announced earlier this year and is one of the wildest modern gaming handhelds out of China I’ve ever seen. It has multiple screens and a bunch of swinging arms that make it look like a Transformer that spans multiple generations of portable Nintendo hardware. A crowdfunding campaign goes live next week, but a hands-on demo in the meantime shows just how bonkers this Android device is.
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A first-look at the OneXSugar Sugar 1 was shared with Sean Hollister at The Verge, who flipped it around at his garage work station like he was solving a portable gaming Rubik’s cube. There are two controller side panels, similar to a Nintendo Switch, but there’s also a second screen, similar to a Nintendo DS, and you can reconfigure them to achieve your preferred ergonomic layout and overload your multi-tasking gamer brain. Finally, you can scroll TikTok AND play games at the same time.
The Sugar 1 sports a 6.01-inch screen and a smaller 3.92-inch display and uses a Snapdragon G3 Gen 3 processor for Android, cloud, and “retro gaming” (read: emulation). In addition to multitasking, the device is clearly aiming at players nostalgic for the days of the DS and 3DS, whose second-screen mechanics should be easily replicated given the form factor. It’ll be a pricey way to revisit, say, Viva Pinata: Pocket Paradise, however. The Sugar 1 crowdfunding campaign goes live July 21, and Hollister suggests the device will cost north of $600.
That pushes the transforming handheld into PC gaming handheld territory. For instance, Microsoft’s upcoming Xbox Rog Ally device is rumored to start at $600, with the beefier Rog Ally X model coming in at closer to $1,000. It’s also well above the current baseline for premium Android gaming handhelds like the Ayn Odin 2 which uses the older Qualcomm Snapdragon 8Gen2 CPU and costs $400. That one is just a screen with handles, though. No fancy hinges, sliders, or second screen.
The Sugar 1 might not end up being anywhere near the most practical gaming device when it finally comes to market, but it’ll no doubt be the most fun to fidget with.
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