Mangmi Air X
Jun. 3rd, 2026 09:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroThis is an Android-based handheld that’s clearly looking to be a direct competitor to Retroid, as it very closely resembles the Retroid Pockets 4-6. Power-wise it’s somewhere around the Pocket 4, in theory able to play PSP and Gamecube well and handle some light PS2 games.
First impressions: Good build quality, nice design, good ergonomics (better than the Retroid without a grip, actually). It pre-loads a bunch of apps, but it’s a very short list (no Dolphin and no DraStic, but it does have Aether, not that it can run anything if you don’t put bios files in manually, and Citra—they clearly had high hopes for what you’d run on this). The game launcher will automatically scan for your games, and in my case it found…six Wonderswan titles and that’s all. (I’m guessing there’s a specific way the folders need to be named?) It does come pre-loaded with all of the latest RetroArch cores, though not the cheats lists.
Basically, this is absolutely not a pick-up-and-play device. Maybe if I’d bought a model with a preloaded SD card the launcher would handle that better, but I suspect that would only cover lower-end systems. There’s a lot of setup involved here to make it a workhorse device. I loaded Daijisho in as an alternate front-end and had to go through mapping all of my rom directories and fiddling with RetroArch controls (it had A/B and X/Y swapped for most of the systems!)
I wasn’t sure if I was going to keep this longer-term, so I didn’t link my Google Play account to it and just sideloaded apps. That actually gave me a nice way to try cracked/modded Android apps without risking one of my better devices. Like the Retroids, it’s very nice for landscape Android apps that you want a controller for.
Also of note: Playing on this for an hour and a half burned through a third of the battery; which means the total playtime on a charge is about four hours. I realize I’m spoiled by Retroid devices getting 6-8 hours, but that’s what I’ve come to expect from the premium-feeling Android devices. Turns out that’s another case where you need to fiddle: When I turned on the “battery saver” mode and turned off “performance mode”, some combination of the two got me down to using only 10% battery for 1 hour of playtime; much more reasonable.
Overall: Retroid devices generally give you a very good bang for your buck, with the tradeoff being that you need to spend a lot of time setting then up: Installing emulators, importing roms, fiddling with settings, etc etc. This is even moreso, as it’s one of the strongest systems at the $100 price point (with decent build quality and ergonomics, to boot) but there’s a lot of work involved in getting it to an ideal. I think I’m going to use it mostly to play sideloaded hacked Android games until it dies or I decide to pass it on.
First impressions: Good build quality, nice design, good ergonomics (better than the Retroid without a grip, actually). It pre-loads a bunch of apps, but it’s a very short list (no Dolphin and no DraStic, but it does have Aether, not that it can run anything if you don’t put bios files in manually, and Citra—they clearly had high hopes for what you’d run on this). The game launcher will automatically scan for your games, and in my case it found…six Wonderswan titles and that’s all. (I’m guessing there’s a specific way the folders need to be named?) It does come pre-loaded with all of the latest RetroArch cores, though not the cheats lists.
Basically, this is absolutely not a pick-up-and-play device. Maybe if I’d bought a model with a preloaded SD card the launcher would handle that better, but I suspect that would only cover lower-end systems. There’s a lot of setup involved here to make it a workhorse device. I loaded Daijisho in as an alternate front-end and had to go through mapping all of my rom directories and fiddling with RetroArch controls (it had A/B and X/Y swapped for most of the systems!)
I wasn’t sure if I was going to keep this longer-term, so I didn’t link my Google Play account to it and just sideloaded apps. That actually gave me a nice way to try cracked/modded Android apps without risking one of my better devices. Like the Retroids, it’s very nice for landscape Android apps that you want a controller for.
Also of note: Playing on this for an hour and a half burned through a third of the battery; which means the total playtime on a charge is about four hours. I realize I’m spoiled by Retroid devices getting 6-8 hours, but that’s what I’ve come to expect from the premium-feeling Android devices. Turns out that’s another case where you need to fiddle: When I turned on the “battery saver” mode and turned off “performance mode”, some combination of the two got me down to using only 10% battery for 1 hour of playtime; much more reasonable.
Overall: Retroid devices generally give you a very good bang for your buck, with the tradeoff being that you need to spend a lot of time setting then up: Installing emulators, importing roms, fiddling with settings, etc etc. This is even moreso, as it’s one of the strongest systems at the $100 price point (with decent build quality and ergonomics, to boot) but there’s a lot of work involved in getting it to an ideal. I think I’m going to use it mostly to play sideloaded hacked Android games until it dies or I decide to pass it on.
