Steam Deck, ROG Ally, Lenovo Legion Go. Three great big, great to use handhelds. Despite all of their differences in screen, weight, OS, they all have one thing in common: they all use AMD chips. But what if they didn’t all have to use AMD? The 7840U, the 6800U, the Z1 Extreme or anything else. What if we returned to the days of Intel handhelds, with better graphics this time around. Well good news everyone! Seems to be that at least one company is coming around to it.
At the Hong Kong Electronics Fair 2023, a company known as Emdoor decided to show off a new handheld; this time running Intel. The wonderfully named Emdoor EM-GP080MTL is a barebones, but admittedly quite nice looking device. For this show, the EM-GP080MTL is running an unnamed 14th generation Intel Metor Lake-H chip, which can go up to a 35 watt TDP. Alongside that comes a new integrated Intel ARC 5 graphics processor, 32gb of ram and storage housed in its M.2 2280 slot. However the nicest bit to me is the 8” 1920×1200 panel, which runs at an aspect ratio of 16:10, which I find to be my personal favorite ratio outside of 3:2.
At HKEF 2023, Emdoor was showing off the GP080 handheld running a number of Triple A games quite smoothly. This includes the likes of Forza Horizon 5, as well as God of War. Running these games well at 1080p leaves me with a few questions of my own. What TDP? What kind of battery would this give you? What is the meaning of life? Amongst a few others. However regardless of this, that kind of power in a handheld is nothing to turn away from, and should hopefully be competitive when compared to the likes of the Steam Deck or ROG Ally.
If you asked me what I would pick, I would go for whatever can provide the best battery life for its performance. The Emdoor and its 48 wHr battery? Well it doesn’t provide me with the greatest of hopes. In the end this is a device that was shown off at an electronics fair. Will it make it to market? I hope so. Will it be cheap? I doubt it. But having choice and competition in the market will always be a good thing to me, and if you’re so interested, this will help bring you more options as well.
What do you think? Would you buy one if it became available? Let us know in the comments below, and chat with us in our Discord!
This page may contain affiliate links, by purchasing something through a link, Retro Handhelds may earn a small commission on the sale at no additional cost to you.
Until, we have at lease 4 hour battery life. I am fine without a X86 handheld. Nice to see Intel in the APU market.