Abxylute E1 retro handheld review

If you spend any time at all in retro handheld gaming communities, you’ll notice a recurring joke that no one ever buys the handhelds to play games on them. Rather, you buy them to set them up, tinker around with the settings, find a way to squeeze some extra performance out of the chip, and then toss it aside and buy the next one.

(In fact, if I’m being honest, it’s less a joke than an accurate description of most people who frequent places like r/SBCGaming or the RetroHandhelds Discord – and I fully include myself in that group, judging from the number of cheap Chinese handhelds I’ve bought, briefly used, and set aside over the years.)

From this perspective, then, an optimist might view the abxylute E1 handheld as the pinnacle of retro handhelds. After all, you can get it for somewhat cheap, and you’ll spend lots and lots of time tinkering with it to get it to work. If you never actually want to play anything, it’s kind of perfect.

Of course, should you want to do anything more than tinker with the E1, you’ll find that it’s not suited to your purposes at all, on the grounds that it’s a terrible handheld in every way imaginable.

The E1’s biggest problem is that nothing seems to work on it. It brags about having a dual OS – Android and Linux – except neither of them are properly configured to play games. As far as I could tell, Android is just there so you can download games (and more on that in a moment), and when you want to play something it sends you over to a weird version of Rocknix where nothing seems to work. It has RetroArch to play most original retro systems, except if you try to configure it – say, to set up the gamepad, or point it to your games folders – it crashes and breaks itself so that nothing further will even open. PPSSPP is there for PSP games, and Portmaster is there if you want to wade into the world of Linux ports, except things are only marginally better there; multiple times I got game backups to run, but they’d either crash as soon as I tried playing anything, or the button presses wouldn’t be recognized and I’d have to quit.

Obviously, Android has its own emulation ecosystem that you could, in theory, delve into – except the E1 has no touchscreen, which means you’ve got to navigate around Chrome and emulators using buttons. It’s entirely possible that if you strip the E1 down to its Android base, it becomes a much better handheld, but I’ll freely admit I didn’t have the patience to find out.

I’ll also note that the E1’s box has a link to download pirated games via a sketchy third-party installer – but not even that works, because, true to form, the installer APK is broken.

You’d think that the other obvious solution would be to install your own OS. After all, the retro handheld community has developed all kinds of alternative solutions, and over the years has taken many subpar handhelds and turned them into gems. Except, again, the E1 seems to be impervious to all of them: a fresh install of Rocknix simply didn’t work. GammaOS has worked wonders on other seemingly broken devices (even RK3566 devices like this one, thanks to GammaOS Core), but I couldn’t get it run here. OSes like Knulli and Spruce, which have proven to be incredible assets for Anbernic and Miyoo devices, respectively, aren’t designed for a device like the E1. You’re basically forced into using the native E1 software, which, as we’ve established above, barely even works to power the device on, without even thinking about gaming.

And even if I had gotten games to work, there are plenty of reasons why you’d be better off using any number of other handhelds. The E1 looks and feels cheap: the d-pad is clunky and mushy, the shoulder buttons are stiff, the screen is dim, and the speakers are tinny.

Perhaps worst of all, the E1 has pretty much no battery life, so even if you could somehow get everything working properly, it wouldn’t matter because you wouldn’t be able to take the handheld anywhere. I really can’t underscore this point enough, either: the E1’s battery drained from literally doing nothing with it. Several evenings I tried charging it all the way to full with the goal of playing it the next morning, only to come back several hours later and find that even though I’d turned the system off, it had drained all the way to 0%. Again, this was from doing literally nothing; I can’t imagine what would happen if I had managed to play a game without having the thing plugged in.

If you’re into handheld gaming, we’re undeniably in a golden age of it. There are handhelds for pretty much every taste, ranging from huge, powerful, and expensive, to small, surprisingly decent, and cheap. Obviously, RAM shortages are going to put a dent into the hobby, but even so, if you want to have a small device that allows you to play up to, say, some GameCube and PS2, that’s absolutely doable right now. Which is why there’s no reason to pick up a handheld as badly made as the abxylute E1. It’s the lowest tier of e-waste imaginable, and with so many much, much better options out there, there’s no reason to even think about buying it.

Abxylute provided us with a abxylute E1 Dual-OS Handheld review unit for review purposes.