MANGMI Air Y Pro Review

The MANGMI Air Y Pro is here

The Air Y Pro is Mangmi’s latest higher end vertical device, one of two they just released – the other being the Air Y. Today’s video will be all about the Air Y Pro since that’s what they sent me, but you may want to check out the Air Y if you wanted a lower budget vertical handheld.

Because, they’re wildly different prices but different specs too. The Mangmi Air Y starts at just $89.99 during the early bird phase which is August 12th to 15th. The Mangmi Air Y Pro starts at $145.99 during the early bird phase. I have the 8GB RAM model here today which starts at $175.99. 

I had honestly hoped to review the lower budget one as I think that’s more interesting, but I do think this is great pricing across the board. At regular price, $95 for the Air Y is a fantastic price when compared to the Brick Pro, and I think $160 for the Air Y Pro is reasonable. Both do have stiff competition though. 

Specs

The Mangmi Air Y Pro that I have here today uses the same Snapdragon 865 processor that they used in their Pocket Max, as well as what Retroid has used in their 5, Mini and Flip 2 so performance at this point is a known quantity. Upscaled PlayStation 2, GameCube and so on are easily achieved, and then the bonus is most everything else – you can get decent performance with PC emulation for a lot of games, some decent performance with other early emulators like PS3, Xbox, Xbox 360 and so on, but those are pretty much bonus like I mentioned. I’ve done a bunch of videos on what the Snapdragon 865 can do in the past that you can check out for other devices.

But the general gist, and with this screen, you’re basically sticking to 2x upscaled for PS2 and GameCube and this has no problems handling those. There’s still the usual problem games, but you can run through most of the catalogs easily. Then you have all the previous retro systems that will work and run just fine of course, 3DS if you wanted to do that, and then play some of the bonus systems after that. Performance here is good, not an issue. 

The model that I have here is the 8GB RAM model, but they are selling a 4GB RAM model as well. I think 4GB is too limited for the Snapdragon 865, so I’d suggest you stick to the 8GB RAM model if you’re going to be buying this.

The Air Y Pro does have active cooling and it’s strictly in the fine category. You have control over what speed to set the fan to, and I stuck to Auto or Silent, but depending on what you play, you may want more. The hum of the fan is louder than I’d want, but there’s no whine and on extreme mode, it’s mostly just the sound of air blowing out – with some mixed in fan noise. I think if you plan to stay in auto, you’ll rarely ever hear it.

Screen

The screen here is the same screen as the one in the Ayaneo Pocket Air Mini, or if not, a basic exact replica of it. It’s a 4.2” 1280 x 960 IPS 60hz screen, but it’s on the low end of acceptable screens to me. It’s also just slightly under 60hz proper which hopefully they can fix. On the Ayaneo Pocket Air Mini, it suffered from extreme ghosting that’s not only visible in Android menus, or doing ghosting tests, but also in game – Super Mario World is an easy test case for this and shows it immediately for me. Unfortunately, this same screen has the same effects on the Air Y Pro and it would be my main deal breaker on this device. 

Mangmi did release an update for this and another issue during the review period, which tells me they’re listening and trying their best. The update didn’t do anything discernible to the ghosting however. This will just be something you need to deal with if you want to use this handheld.

Ghosting is always person to person dependent – some can’t see it, some do and don’t care and so on. As someone who struggles with the Switch 2 screen for the same reasons, it’s something that is a deal breaker to me personally, but it will be up to you on this one. The screen itself otherwise has good colors, contrast and so on (some may say even better than a recent 4:3 OLED handheld), but I just don’t think this is an acceptable screen for this price. The TrimUI Brick Pro’s screen, while less resolution and a bit smaller at 4”, is vastly better and would have been a much better choice here – that’s a really good screen and it’s a direct competitor to their budget Air Y model which has the same screen as my Air Y Pro.

We do have full video out here on the Y Pro, which would be a positive over the Y since that processor can’t do video out. Seems to work just fine in my testing, and was easy enough to do over USB-C. You can of course pair it with a bluetooth controller for docking. 

Ports

Taking a quick tour of the actual handheld, and on the left side we actually have a programmable button and a power button, but also a volume wheel which is rare. It’s clickable as well. You can assign a hotkey to it, so it’s set to mute by default when pushing it, or holding it opens the button expansion page which is where you can set hotkeys for different buttons on the device, single press long press and so on. I will say, not a lover of the volume wheel – much prefer the two buttons, but it is unique.

On the top is the USB-C port, headphone jack, SD card slot and microphone. Right side has the exhaust, and the bottom is down firing speakers. 

Controls & Comfort

On the back is a very interesting layout for shoulders and triggers. Apparently the Ayaneo Pocket DMG had this layout before, but this is my first time experiencing it and I am really not a fan of this. I think you can easily get used to L1 and R1, those aren’t really an issue – it’s a bit weird, but you could live with it. L2 and R2 are something I never really want to see again – It’s kind of a teeter totter, or a seesaw. You push L2, it goes down, R2 lifts up, and vice versa. That being said, it fights you if you need to use both – so push L2 down, R2 lifts up, you use a lot more pressure on R2 to get that down and it doesn’t feel good. Even just pushing a single trigger doesn’t feel good. This entire back is just not for me personally.

Then we get to the front and it’s a pretty standard vertical device with sticks layout here. I do like the feel of the dpad, it’s a larger looser dpad, lots of pivot, but accuracy isn’t amazing – left or right on the dpad can go up and down as well – which isn’t the greatest in Pokemon for example.

The buttons themselves are near silent, very nice if you plan to play this quietly and they have lots of travel and feel really good to press. They also did something interesting, X and Y are concave, sunk in type buttons, while A and B are convex, typical bulged out buttons. Feels good in the hands like this.

And the sticks will be a person to person dependent type thing. I think if you’re the type like me that just doesn’t enjoy sticks on a vertical, then there’s nothing new here to change your mind, but otherwise they are serviceable, they’re in a decent spot and can work just fine – but I just find sticks on a vertical to not work out well for comfort and use. 

Overall though, comfort wise, it’s pretty comfy to hold and use. I like the plastic they used here, it’s a soft rubber type, which feels nice in the hands and I can appreciate that. The trade off however is fingerprints and smudges. The Black color will definitely have a lot of this, but even on the Retro color here, I can see fingerprints and smudges. That being said, the light has to hit it just right at just the right angle and so I wouldn’t consider this an issue for Retro – but I can see Black being a problem.

Software

The operating system is Android 13 and as usual, Mangmi has a lot of features in here. The swipe down menu has all of your usual fixings for fan mode, button layout and so on, holding the M button gets you the side panel where you can adjust performance, fan mode and a performance overlay or jump to the controller icon to play with a few more settings – they didn’t really optimize this panel for this display though as you can see.

Lastly settings gets you to the handheld settings which is where you can adjust a lot more settings if you need to. Something still missing though is per-app settings like AYN and Retroid devices have, would love to see that. 

Unfortunately Android’s data storage is still locked down here like their Pocket Max as well, so Syncthing users should be aware of that. This is less of an issue with my forks of Dolphin and Duckstation, but still a concern.

Battery Life

Then we get to the battery here and it’s a 5000mAh battery. As usual with my tests, I do them properly with a full drain of 100 to 0%, 100% brightness here, 10% audio and quiet fan mode with the balanced performance preset.

For ARMSX2 at a 2x upscale, using Dragon Quest 8 as the test game, I saw 3 hours 2 minutes. I sort of expected better and I’m not sure what might be different here as the Pocket Max was almost double this result. 

Who is this for?

And so wrapping things up here, the question is, who is the Mangmi Air Y Pro for and it’s a hard question to answer. When looking at high end verticals, you have things like the Ayaneo Pocket DMG at over $300, Ayaneo Pocket Vert at over $250, Anbernic RG477V at $220 and now the Mangmi Air Y Pro at $160.

I think in a shoot out between the Mangmi Air Y and the Anbernic RG477V, the Anbernic wins on most every metric, but it’s also $60 more. The more interesting comparison is this versus the Anbernic RG406V and while this does have more power, I think the 406V may be a better purchase overall when we consider screen, controls and everything. 

The Air Y, to me, is the more interesting device of the two new Mangmi releases as it has a bit less competition in that price range and it would be just a straight fight between it and the TrimUI Brick Pro. I wish I had that device here in my hands as I think that price range, and these specs mesh better than the Air Y Pro’s.