Buy the Mangmi Air X here: https://joeysrh.link/MI_AIRX
What is the Mangmi Air X?
Hey everyone, Joey here, and today I’m excited. Today, we actually have a device that is doing something new, something different, something better in a price range that has been stagnant for almost four years now.
This is the Mangmi Air X, and it can run PSP, without frameskip or hacks, at a 2x for most games, it can run 3DS, at native, for a lot of games, it can even run some GameCube, with some hacks, at good framerates, and I guess the kicker is, it’s $90. Or well, $70 if you’re lucky enough to get in the early bird. Let’s go with $90.
$70 early bird and $90 regular price. Mangmi has told me this will be available for order early September, so a few weeks to go on that front. Any listings you see currently on AliExpress is third party resellers with marked up prices, I’d suggest you avoid those and wait for the official launch directly from mangmi.com.
It’s a wider Retroid Pocket 2S
For anyone that has or had a Retroid Pocket 2S, you know how special that device was. It was also a $90 device that had very similar, if not the same, performance as the Mangmi Air X, and should have disrupted the market two years ago when it came out. It never did, for whatever reason, people still kept buying Anbernic devices despite the clear upgrades of the 2S in comparison.
Mostly, the issue was the small screen size for a lot of people.
Well, guess what, the Mangmi Air X this time, with the same power as the 2S, should be an actual disruption to the market for this power, and this price. It’s that mid-priced handheld that I’ve been waiting for so that we can actually have a normal, not discounted handheld in this price range in-between the Anbernic H700’s and the T820’s of the world.
Consider this as a widescreen Retroid Pocket 2S. At least until Retroid decides to use the Classic’s processor to make a 2S successor for $99 or something.
Specs
So let’s talk specs first.
There’s three colors, I have the grey, there’s a black and there’s a white. I wish I had the white, it looks awesome.
There’s a Snapdragon 662 processor inside, older chip, but more than fine for the power and the price as you’ll see today. Not many benefits to Snapdragon with this power, no real custom driver support usage here, but it does come in handy for battery life.
There’s 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage. I don’t love the small storage, but for what this can play and the price, it’s fine.
There is a fan.
We have a 5.5” 1080p IPS display at 450 nits..
Then we have WiFi 5, Bluetooth 5.0, USB-C charging, but not fast charging, headphone jack and SD card slot.
All of this runs on Android 14, which is locked down for Syncthing usage unfortunately.
Dpad
Taking a tour of the device, we have the dpad at the top, not my favorite position, but it’s fine here. The dpad has a smooth texture to it, and I think it may be the point of contention for many people – I would have preferred a normal style dpad, with grooves and a different texture and so on. However, accuracy wise – it works out well. No issues with pulling off fighting moves, or in platformers, but it can be more on the slippery end for sure.
Sticks
Then we have basically Retroid style hall effect sticks here, and they’re good – just not my favorite location. There’s a small offset for controls, but not enough and so any stick heavy games are going to not be a fun time as you’d come to expect from sticks on the bottom like this. But looking at the actual sticks, and checking them – there’s no cardinal snapping issues, they’re nice and accurate and I found they were good. I think any Retroid fans, 3+, 4 and 4 Pro and so on, who liked that layout, will like them here. I don’t see it winning over anyone that doesn’t like sticks bottom or anyone that finds the Retroid’s uncomfortable – it’s the same here.
Face buttons
On the buttons side, we have super tall, long travel buttons that are not silent, but I also wouldn’t call them loud. Maybe don’t listen to me when it comes to button sounds – my Odin 2 Portal’s buttons are silent, yet everyone says those are loud. I’d say these are louder than my Odin 2 Portal, if that tells you anything at all and louder than Anbernic devices if that helps. They sound more like Retroid’s devices, the Retroid Pocket 5 or Mini.
Buttons, shoulders & triggers
Then they do the unfortunate thing of having start and select next to each other on the bottom right – not a fan of this personally, I prefer having them on opposite ends of the screen. On the left, we have home and back, as you’d expect on an Android handheld.
At the top, we have super loud and clicky shoulder buttons. This I’m qualified to tell you is loud and clicky, but good. And then we have actual analog triggers, a nice thing to see and continues that Retroid Pocket 2S but bigger type discussion.
Having tested the triggers out, the 100 mark hits quite a bit before the end of the trigger bottoms out, which can be a good thing to some people, or possibly something they can address or add settings for.
There’s also the power and volume buttons at the top and the exhaust for the fan.
On the bottom, we have two slits for speakers on each side, SD card slot, possible microphone input, headphone jack and USB C charging.
Speakers
On the speakers front, for down firing speakers, they’re pretty good to me. Above average definitely, in my personal opinion. I wish they were front firing, but whatever is happening here with the dual slits on each side sounds very good to me. For the price, you won’t complain.
On the back, is the fan intake but also nice curved grooves for ergonomics. These do help quite a bit, big fan of them rounding the back out like this.
Overall, I think the dpad top crowd will be very happy with this. The thumb hitting sticks aspect is pretty minimal overall, and it’s a comfy enough handheld all things together. This is kind of like a TrimUI Smart Pro 2, in a lot of different ways.
Screen
Let’s talk screen now, and this is a 1920x1080p, 60hz IPS panel. I think the brightness slider may need some adjustments with percentages as it seems to have very little difference past 60 or so percent and doesn’t equal below 60% with the ranges.
Otherwise, there is some visible ghosting – but not a lot. It’s not Odin 2 levels of ghosting, and nothing to be concerned with, but it’s there and slight. I wouldn’t consider it a big deal.
The concern I have for the panel is that it’s not a set 60hz, something that they can likely fix over the air as other devices have – it’s a bit below 60hz. That does mean you’ll notice some stuttering in 60hz games, especially in retroarch if you’re susceptible to that. It’s not as bad as like, an Anbernic RG34XX or most of the Anbernic h700 line which all don’t run at 60hz and by a lot, but it’s something that should be fixed.
My only other concern display wise is it can get very, very hot. Depending on the content you’re playing, or how bright you want to go, touching the screen can be uncomfortably warm to hot in some scenarios.
Fan & fan modes
And I guess that ties right into the fan, and there’s three fan modes – silent, balance and extreme. Silent turns on at CPU temps of 70c and turns off at 60c, balanced turns on at 60c and off at 50c and extreme is always on. The extremely weird part is that silent ramps up,so it’s not a true silent or quiet mode like most devices with a set RPM speed and that’s it. It ramps up like it’s in Smart mode. On Extreme, the fan is unbearable from a noise perspective – it’s not air being pushed out, but the fan noise, some coil whine and everything combined.
Normally I’d say that, thankfully you don’t need to use the fan at all, but if you do plan on playing any PSP or 3DS, even without performance mode, it does turn on due to the heat. Given the fact that silent here isn’t a true silent as a stuck RPM, and it ramps, that means there’s no way to avoid the fan currently.
Software
As far as software goes, this is running Android 14, which does cause problems with Syncthing for anything behind Android’s data storage. Otherwise, it’s a fairly normal Android build. They do have their own launcher, that takes a very long time to start and is fairly barebones – I wouldn’t use it in its current state. From the drop down, you can enable the sidebar which is tricky – it’ll show you performance, or you can set it to be an overlay on screen.
You can also push and hold the home button to pull up this sidebar menu in-games, so it has a hotkey.
You can also enable performance mode, and this will cause the device to heat up more, give it more juice for games and get you better performance overall. During my livestream testing games, I had this set on for the entire period, but if I was using the device myself, I’d leave this off.
If you head over, you can swap to button mapping mode if you want to map on-screen buttons to controls. There’s also a button layout switcher to go to xbox or nintendo layouts. Then you have a turbo fire section and a joystick inversion section.
Lastly, there’s a small little quick settings area.
If you head into Android’s settings, Mangmi has their own Handheld Settings section. Some really cool features here that I haven’t seen before. You can have it turn off wifi or bluetooth after locking the device, or even auto shutdown if it’s been on for days in sleep.
There’s a gamepad tester and calibration app, you can adjust the joystick LED’s, and you can update the system all through these menus.
Overall, most of the features you want without any of the downsides of bloat.
Streaming
Now just quickly, given Anbernic’s limitations in their Android software, the Air X does work with GeForce Now right out of the box and the controls are recognized. Streaming as a whole isn’t the absolute best, given the WiFi 5 chip inside and all of that – but it’s an option if you want it.
On that note, looking at Artemis decoding times, and they’re pretty high for likely just being an older snapdragon. Artemis is regularly 11-12ms or higher, and services like XBPlay for Xbox streaming are similar at 16ms on average – that’s basically a full frame of latency.
For comparison, good streaming devices are sub 1ms or 6-7ms at the high – so from my perspective, this does not pass the streaming test and by a large margin.
Battery Life
And now we get to the battery discussion, and I had to test out a few different scenarios here which was extremely difficult given there’s no fast charging on the device – it is very, very slow to charge so I hope you appreciate the work that I put in to get numbers on this. As always, with my numbers, they are full 100% to 0%, brightness at 100% for worst case scenario, wifi is on and volume at 10% and fan is on silent mode.
For PSP, I was able to see 181 minutes or 3 hours basically of just straight PSP, at 2x, without performance mode on. With performance mode on, this dropped a bit to 166 minutes or 2 hours 46 minutes.
I did the same test, without performance mode on at 50% brightness to see how much the panel brightness is affecting battery life and saw pretty much the exact same numbers, so it doesn’t seem like it affects that much.
For 3DS, without performance mode, I saw 285 minutes or 4 hours 45 minutes of battery. With performance mode, this was 200 minutes or 3 hours 20 minutes which is a pretty sharp decline in battery using performance mode here.
I will say, for some titles on both systems, it will be necessary to use performance mode to get playable framerates. Or at least what I call playable.
Then we have Game Boy and my reasoning here was just to see what the easiest system to emulate would be battery life wise, and it was 400 minutes or 6 hours 40 minutes.
For standby over 24 hours, it was a consistent 3 percent loss and the biggest annoyance is charging time, which is 100 minutes from 0 to 100 which is really rough given the no fast charging here.
Long story short, I think these are good numbers overall minus the charging speed, which really is just unfortunate and will be tough to get used to for many people.
Android games
Let’s jump into some games and talk about them.
First up, Android games wise – given the 64GB internal storage limit, I only had space to install Genshin Impact and I wouldn’t consider it playable. This was on all low settings, 30FPS and there’s enough hitching, slowdowns and everything with nothing happening on screen that it’s not a great time overall. I’d imagine most of the gooner Android games will not run well on here.
PS1 & Under
But let’s take a look at RetroArch, using integer scaling here for every system and as long as you don’t mind black bars, this is great for all systems from completely retro, to Game Boys, to PlayStation 1 and all of that is easily playable and upscaled if you want in PlayStation.
I’ve said it many times, big fan of 16:9 screens especially because of how big GBA can get, but also because of how many more systems it opens you up to. Not only can you easily play the 4:3 systems here, but it opens you to side by side DS as well. We’ll talk about Nintendo DS in a bit.
The usual test for upscaled PlayStation is using Duckstation standalone and Final Fantasy 9’s beginning. We are at 5x and no slowdown at all here – so PS1, upscaled, across the board is something you can easily do.
Sega Dreamcast
Then, let’s take a look at Sega Dreamcast, as always no frameskip here or anything, native resolution and no problems here for these games either.
Nintendo 64
Now, let’s jump over to Nintendo 64 with M64Plus FZ. N64’s test game is always Mario Tennis – if Mario Tennis runs, then all of Nintendo 64 is playable and we use M64Plus FZ standalone to fix the texture glitches and issues that show up in RetroArch for Mario Tennis that you see on all of these budget handhelds.
Mario Tennis is on the cusp of perfect at native resolution using GlideN64-Medium. It’s close enough that for me, I would be happy in finally calling another device besides the Retroid Pocket 2S as certified N64 for under $100. There’s only ever been two.
The interesting thing is the Retroid Pocket 2S is actually pretty much exactly the same – it has the same Nintendo 64 performance in Mario Tennis with the same settings. I would put the Air X as literally just slightly below it in power. The 2S was such a fantastic device, one of Retroid’s best.
PlayStation Portable
Then we get to PSP and this is where things start to shine. Obviously with the 2S’ smaller screen, PSP was never on the menu despite the ability to play it. PSP here, on the Air X, across the board is playable – everything at 1x, many at 2x and some at even 3x. All of this is without frameskip or hacks like you’d need on the TrimUI Smart Pro. This is where the difference maker is, you have that power here for proper PSP which we’ve never seen under $100 before. It’s exciting, it’s awesome.
Nintendo 3DS
Then we get to 3DS with Azahar, using Vulkan, native resolution and right eye rendering disabled and I was shocked to see how playable it is. Not even just playable, the only reason I’m hesitating on fully committing to all of 3DS being playable at full speed is because I haven’t tested it all. Outside of compiling shaders, everything runs at full speed, 99% of the time, that I’ve tried. Absolutely crazy, and as you know from my videos, I’m usually a harsh critic on calling a system playable.
Nintendo DS
The craziest part? Nintendo DS struggles more than 3DS and that’s not a joke. Let’s put Drastic away for now, we all know Drastic can run easily on this device because it runs on potato devices. On this device, you’d want to use the MelonDS DS core or MelonDS standalone, for retroachievements and so on. The crazy thing, some games are right at the cusp of full speed with no room for fast forwarding, like in Pokemon Black 2. The intro, can’t run full speed, playing the game and you are pretty much always at 59/60FPS with no real room for fast forward at all.
Now, MelonDS has always been hard to run, and I would consider this easily playable and a good way to play these games, but it’s something to be aware of for sure. Drastic fans, no issues of course, MelonDS or retroachievement fans, be aware that some games, may have a limit of just full speed with nothing more to give for fast forwarding.
Nintendo GameCube
Now we get to the bonus systems – these systems, I would not buy this device for, I would not even bother playing or trying, but can be played for the crazies who want to try it.
For example, Dolphin. Dolphin is fun – Mario Kart Double Dash, plays mostly full speed with VBI Skip on as a hack. You can go further with hacks and such, but it’s close enough here to be a decent time. Animal Crossing is another one, small hiccups here and there, but completely playable for a lot of people. F-Zero is a big nope, no matter what, and so in Super Mario Sunshine and most of the GameCube catalogue, but if you want to pick and choose some games, you could play some.
PlayStation 2
PS2 is less sexy this way – some JRPG’s are playable and this is with all hacks applied, using the Fast preset in NetherSX2, all sorts of hacks and speed ups being used and you can get away with games like AR Tonelico or Atelier Iris, or even some Persona 3 although that I found some slowdown in just talking to people. Otherwise 99% of the PS2 library is off limits here, no Burnout Revenge, no Shadow of the Colossus obviously, none of that.
Other
And before you ask, no, Switch even with custom drivers and Wii U, are both not playable here. Neither run well, neither are close to running well – I do not know about indies, that doesn’t count as Switch, but yeah, off the table.
If you’re asking me, you get this for PSP and under, which I’m so glad I can finally say and also 3DS if you want. We’ve finally jumped some systems and I no longer have to always say, this is a PS1 and under handheld for something under $100.
Wrap up
So let’s wrap up this long review.
This device is exciting. The price is exciting. The power is exciting. The entire thing is exciting. I’m hoping this is the kick this hobby needs to get more competitive with things in the sub $100 market because up until this point, we’ve been stuck with Anbernic’s devices that just continually uses the same powered chips for years, and actually in the case of the h700, went backwards from the RK3566 and no one else besides Retroid’s one single device tried to change that.
I can’t be the only person tired of the stagnation in the sub $100 market for the last few years. It’s been exhausting to see especially when we know there are processors and options available for us to move past the PS1 and under issue.
The Mangmi Air X, absolutely does and at $70 or $90, it’s a steal of a price for what you get here. No doubt in my mind – we finally have a device that’s an upgrade in performance, but not a break the bank situation either.
The concerns on my part, I brought up throughout the video, but let’s consolidate them here. It’s a new company, with unknown origins and unknown reliability – something to be weary of. The screen, not the greatest, but certainly not an issue at this price point – main concerns for me being the heat and the not being a set 60hz. The fan can be quite annoying, and there’s no way around it and lastly, the ergonomics can be tricky for stick heavy games which is the usual downside of dpad top handhelds with not enough of an offset for controls.
Otherwise, outside of little nitpicking and everything, this is a slam dunk of a handheld in my opinion. Awesome job by Mangmi here. Absolutely easy recommendation here from me.
