The OneXFly F1 Pro has a secret weapon to take on the Steam Deck and SteamOS

Plenty of challengers have tried to take down Valve's Steam Deck since its release in 2022, but few have even come close. The OneXPlayer OneXFly F1 Pro, though, has a good shot at dethroning the Steam Deck, if you ignore the value, and it's all thanks to its control software, which works so well with Windows that I almost forgot I was using Windows in the first place.

I'll have a full review of the OneXPlayer OneXFly F1 Pro ready soon, but it's the efficiency and performance of the OneXConsole software that has completely turned my head to thinking this could challenge the picks on our best handheld guide, even with quite a high price.

The OneXFly F1 Pro I've been playing around with contains an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, 32GB of LPDDR5x-7500MHz RAM, and a 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD. Throw in a 7-inch 144Hz OLED display with a 1,920 x 1,080 resolution, and you've got a handheld that, on paper, has the Steam Deck beat in virtually every department, except one… the operating system.

SteamOS has always been and continues to be one of the biggest reasons why the Steam Deck is so popular. It runs so seamlessly on Valve's portable that, for gamers who are happy just using the Steam ecosystem, it's got everything you could need to play your favorite games, including a game rating system.

Perhaps OneXPlayer knows this too, because it has created a control software that works better with the Windows operating system than any other program I've tried. Whether it's Armoury Crate, MSI Center, AyaSpace, or even the current Xbox full-screen mode, none compares to the efficiency of the OneXConsole software.

I also highlighted similar positive steps in my AOKZOE A1X review, leading me to brand it a "Windows handheld done right." Much of the same applies to the OneXFly F1 Pro, only this software now works even better.

With a single press of the quick access menu button, you have complete access to customize the performance, display, memory, sound, and vibration settings, on top of a wealth of other options. It's so often the catch that you can only change select settings via a quick access menu, with bigger changes pulling you into the full-screen experience, where you have to wade through cumbersome menu screens before then tracing your steps back to the desktop or application you were running.

OneXConsole allows for all key settings that I've found myself searching for when using gaming handhelds to be changed from the quick access menu, and it makes running games on a Windows handheld a much smoother experience. The only reason you'll ever need to open the full version of OneXConsole is to update it or to change the VRAM allocation, a process that requires a system restart.

The most impressive part of OneXConsole isn't even the sheer volume of options available via the quick access menu, but the fact that it allows such changes to be made without disrupting the flow of Windows or any active application. I have yet to experience any lag, stutter, crashes, or instances of programs entering a state of non-response.

In previous versions of OneXConsole, there was also an issue where, when bringing up the quick access menu, the controls would work on both the menu and the game running in the background. This is now resolved, and the controls are isolated to either the menu or the game.

With this fix, and with all settings changes being persistent when you reboot the OneXFly F1 Pro handheld, this means you can get into games quicker every time you use the device. I find myself booting the F1 Pro, double-tapping Steam to open up my games library, and playing any of my installed games just as quickly as I can when cold booting the Steam Deck. This is the closest any handheld has come to matching the efficiency of SteamOS, even if it's still missing a lot of the bells and whistles that make SteamOS great, such as a superior sleep-and-wake process, a game rating system, and a refined full-screen experience. These, however, are nice-to-haves rather than essential to the core of a gaming handheld, especially the game rating system, considering the same Linux-based limitations don't apply to a Windows-based handheld.

When it comes to the OneXFly F1 Pro, the elephant in the room is its price. The configuration that I've been testing has an MSRP of $1,499. You could buy three Steam Deck LCD models for this price and still have a few hundred bucks left to buy games, which could be seen as another example of gaming handheld prices being out of control. This realistically means it probably won't wrestle the overall crown from the Steam Deck as a recommendation for most buyers. However, for any gamers who value peak performance and don't mind still having to navigate some Windows idiosyncrasies, it's going to put up one hell of a fight.

Would you spend this much on a gaming handheld given the power you get in return? Or is the Steam Deck still your go-to portable no matter what? Let us know over on our Discord server.