Author Archives: JC Torres

Most Gaming Handhelds Make You Choose, But the Win Max 3 Doesn’t

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Most handheld gaming PCs ask you to accept a single, fixed compromise between power, battery life, and weight. The GPD Win Max 3 refuses that trade-off entirely. Its clamshell body is built around a base chassis that can be reconfigured with a snap-on battery pack, an external cooling module, or both, turning one small laptop into several different machines depending on what the moment calls for.

Strip it down to its lightest form and the Win Max 3 weighs just 815g, closer to a paperback novel than a gaming rig. Clip on the 97Wh battery module and it grows to 1,220g, trading some portability for hours of unplugged play. Swap that for the cooling module instead, and the machine settles at 985g while unlocking sustained performance that would otherwise cook a chassis this size. Every configuration reshapes the same 207mm x 147mm footprint.

Designer: GPD

That flexibility exists because the hardware inside earns it. An AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 or 388 processor drives Radeon 8060S graphics, paired with up to 128GB of LPDDR5x memory that can allocate as much as 96GB directly to the GPU. GPD claims the chip can hold 100W at 88°C with no fan module attached at all, and adding one, or a pair of them, pushes sustained output to 110 W without needing a dock nearby.

Picture a commute where the base unit alone slips into a bag, light enough to ignore until a layover turns into three hours of downtime. Clip on the battery module then, and a handheld built for a quick match becomes one built to survive an entire flight without hunting for an outlet. Back at a desk, pull the battery off and attach the cooling module instead, and the same chassis stops sipping power and starts pushing toward its ceiling.

The 9.06-inch AMOLED display carries its own share of the workload, running at up to 165Hz with HDR10 active at the same time, a pairing few handhelds manage without dimming one to preserve the other. Underneath the screen, a full-size keyboard sits below two Xbox-style control clusters, with the touchpad placed above the keys instead of below them, an arrangement that keeps typing and gaming postures from fighting each other.

Storage follows the same modular logic as everything else, with M.2 2280, M.2 2230, and Mini SSD 1517 slots available at once rather than forcing a single-drive ceiling. A USB4 port supports GPD’s own G2 graphics dock, so the same unit that fits in a jacket pocket can also feed a full external GPU setup at a desk. None of these pieces work in isolation; they’re designed to be added, removed, and swapped as the day’s task changes.

What the Win Max 3 ultimately sells isn’t a spec sheet. It’s the idea that a device this size doesn’t have to pick a single identity. Battery life, raw wattage, and portability usually fight each other inside a sealed shell, and here they’ve been separated into parts you attach only when you need them, and left off entirely when you don’t.

The post Most Gaming Handhelds Make You Choose, But the Win Max 3 Doesn’t first appeared on Yanko Design.

30 Years After the Keychain, Bandai Just Made the Tamagotchi a Ring

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The original Tamagotchi was a plastic egg about 50 mm tall that you clipped to your bag and tried not to kill. Thirty years later, Bandai has announced a version you wear on your finger, the 39th entry in the main series, and by far the smallest one yet. The Tamagotchi Ring houses a 0.56-inch color LCD in a body 28 mm tall, roughly half the size of that 1996 keychain, and it took Bandai two years to figure out how to make it work.

Miniaturizing something this far doesn’t happen by shrinking the parts. It requires rethinking the entire internal layout. The Tamagotchi Ring contains 64 total components, 52 electronic and 12 plastic, crammed into a body measuring 28mm x 23mm x 35mm. The 0.56-inch display is the smallest color LCD ever fitted to a Tamagotchi, and the battery, now rechargeable rather than a replaceable coin cell, charges via an included case because there simply wasn’t room for anything else.

Designer: Bandai

What it does despite that size is the part worth paying attention to. Thirty raiseable characters are in there, along with minigames and a room customization feature. It’s a complete Tamagotchi experience, not a reduced one, running on hardware small enough that Bandai could mount it on a ring band. The design sits on the finger like a small wearable sculpture rather than a piece of consumer electronics.

The announcement arrived on August 27, 2026, timed to mark the franchise’s 30th anniversary. That timing isn’t incidental. The Tamagotchi has been through enough reinventions to know when a milestone deserves something genuinely new rather than a color variant. A ring-form virtual pet is a different object than a keychain pet, even if the creature inside behaves the same way. It changes where the Tamagotchi lives in your day and how visibly you’re tending to it.

The ring comes in three colorways: Black x Metallic Silver, Light Blue x Metallic Gold, and Pink x Pearl White. It’s designed for Japanese ring size 14, which sits at approximately 17.3 mm inner diameter, with an included adapter to bring it down to size 10. That translates roughly to US ring sizes 7 and 5.5, respectively, covering a reasonable range without requiring multiple SKUs.

Battery life hasn’t been specified, which is the honest gap in what Bandai has disclosed. The rechargeable approach means you won’t be swapping coin cells in the middle of the day, but runtime under actual gameplay conditions is still unknown. The charging case is included in the box, which at least solves the problem of where to stow it when it needs power.

Bandai hasn’t announced plans for a direct international launch, so international buyers are looking at third-party import channels for now. Shipping doesn’t start until February 2027, which is a long lead time for a preorder opened in August. It suggests the manufacturing challenge here is real and that Bandai isn’t rushing it to market. For 64 components in a ring, that patience probably counts for something.

The post 30 Years After the Keychain, Bandai Just Made the Tamagotchi a Ring first appeared on Yanko Design.

The ZWO Seestar S50 Pro Shrinks a Hardware Store Into a Camera Bag

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Astrophotography has always had a bit of a reputation problem. Getting a decent image of a nebula or galaxy typically means wrestling with a telescope, an equatorial mount, a dedicated camera, and enough cables to open a small hardware store. The ZWO Seestar S50 Pro changes that entirely, packing all of it into one tidy package you can carry out on a clear night.

At 2.8kg and folded down to roughly the size of a small camera bag, the S50 Pro is genuinely portable in a way that traditional astronomy rigs aren’t. There are no power cables to run, no separate computer to boot up, and no star alignment ritual to sit through. You just set it down on a tripod, open the app, and you’re already looking at the sky.

Designer: ZWO Astro

Click Here to Buy Now: $899 $999 ($100 off). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours!

The optical heart of the Seestar S50 Pro is a four-element apochromatic lens built with extra-low dispersion glass, which is a meaningful upgrade that most beginner telescopes skip entirely. That 50mm aperture gathers substantially more light than the 30mm systems typically found at this price range, which means fainter structures become visible, and star shapes stay clean and round rather than bleeding into soft halos at the edges.

What makes the Seestar S50 Pro genuinely different from its predecessor is the dual-camera system. A telephoto camera with an 880mm-equivalent focal length sits alongside a wide-angle unit with a 63-degree field of view, and both cameras shoot at 4K resolution. The telephoto hunts for deep-sky details, while the wide-angle takes in the full sweep of the night sky above it.

That’s also where the Seestar S50 Pro makes a compelling case for shooting from cities or suburbs. A built-in triple filter system, including a dual-band light pollution filter targeting wavelengths specific to nebulae, pulls usable detail from skies that would otherwise wash everything out. A dark frame filter handles noise in longer exposures, and a magnetic solar filter handles the daytime shift.

The Seestar app, which runs the whole operation, doesn’t ask you to know much astronomy to get started. You tap a target, and the telescope finds it, locks on, and begins stacking exposures automatically. There’s also an AI assistant you can simply talk to, naming the object you want to see, and it handles positioning and capture without any further input from you.

The wide-angle camera is where the more visible creative benefits live. A single tap is all it takes to stitch a complete Milky Way arch, with the device planning and capturing every frame on its own. Star trail sessions convert automatically into videos showing the sky in motion over time, and telephoto mosaic stitching can push images all the way to 8K resolution.

The S50 Pro doesn’t put itself away when the sun comes up, either. The telephoto camera, with its 880mm-equivalent reach, works just as well for birdwatching, distant landscapes, or capturing rare solar events with the included magnetic solar filter. It’s a surprisingly capable long-range daylight imaging device that transitions naturally into a serious astrophotography rig once the sky goes dark.

The 10,000mAh battery keeps the S50 Pro running for up to nine hours, enough to outlast most late-night sessions without a power bank nearby. Underpinning the whole tracking system is a zero-backlash precision drive that holds steady even when the wind gets involved, which is particularly useful in equatorial mode, where individual exposures can stretch to 60 seconds. The Telescope Network feature lets you control the device remotely, which means a cloudy local sky doesn’t have to end a session if the telescope is stationed somewhere clearer.

Nine hours of battery, a footprint that fits in a backpack, and no manual alignment to wrestle with before you can start shooting. That’s the version of astrophotography the Seestar S50 Pro is making a case for, and it’s a convincing one. The sky has always been worth looking at. The S50 Pro just makes it considerably harder to run out of excuses not to.

Click Here to Buy Now: $899 $999 ($100 off). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours!

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Business Cards Were Forgettable, so Bandai Built a $22 Mecha Case

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Handing over a business card is, in most professional settings, a fairly unremarkable moment. You produce it, they take it, everyone moves on. Bandai Spirits, the company behind some of the most precisely engineered collectible robots in the world, has decided this moment deserves better. The Mobile Stationery Automatic Transformation Business Card Case deploys your card at the press of a button, rotating 180 degrees with a mechanical flourish that nobody is going to forget.

This is the debut product of Bandai’s new Mobile Stationery line, which is exactly what it sounds like: office stationery built with the engineering sensibility of a collectible mecha toy. The series name in Japanese is 機動文具, which intentionally borrows the kanji for “mobile suit” from Gundam’s full title. That’s not accidental branding. It signals that the same precision manufacturing techniques behind Bandai’s Chogokin die-cast figures went into making a business card holder.

Designer: Bandai

The mechanism itself is the product. When the case is closed, it sits flat and compact at approximately 125mm x 95mm x 25 mm, which is thin enough to slip into a jacket pocket without much bulk. Press the button, and it automatically opens with a 180-degree rotation that presents your card as if a small piece of machinery just woke up. The action is fast, repeatable, and genuinely surprising to anyone who hasn’t seen it before.

It’s made from ABS, the same material used across Bandai’s figure line, and sized to accept standard Japanese No. 4 business cards at 55mm x 91mm and a recommended paper thickness of 0.24mm. The fit matters here because a loose card in an automated case would undermine the entire presentation. The case holds the card securely in the closed position and positions it cleanly during deployment.

Three colorways are available, each aiming at a different kind of professional. The Toy Color is exactly what it sounds like, a vibrant, primary-palette version that makes no attempt to pass for a conventional office accessory and leans directly into the Gundam aesthetic. The Standard Color is subtler and more desk-neutral. The Black Color is the one you’d bring to a meeting where you still want the mechanism to surprise people without the case itself making a statement before it even opens.

The practical argument for something like this is harder to articulate than it might seem, which is part of what makes it interesting. Business card rituals in Japan carry real social weight, and the act of presenting a card is meant to be deliberate and memorable. A case that automates the drama of that moment, that turns the exchange into a small performance, fits surprisingly neatly into that context rather than clashing with it.

The Mobile Stationery line is Bandai’s first move into office accessories, and this particular opening product is doing a lot of work to establish what that line is. It’s a functional object that holds business cards. It’s also a small transformer that deploys them theatrically. Both things are true, and the case doesn’t apologize for either one.

The post Business Cards Were Forgettable, so Bandai Built a $22 Mecha Case first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Galaxy S26 FE Beats Samsung’s Own Flagships to One UI 9 at $700

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The “Fan Edition” label has historically meant a Samsung phone that trades some flagship firepower for a more accessible price. The Galaxy S26 FE keeps that tradition mostly intact at $699.99, but it comes with something the Galaxy S26 Ultra, S26+, and S26 don’t have yet: One UI 9 running on Android 17 out of the box. The FE getting there first is a small reversal of the usual order.

That software distinction matters because One UI 9 is where most of the new things actually happen. The hardware story is relatively familiar: a 6.7-inch FHD+ Dynamic AMOLED 2X display at 120Hz with 1,900 nits peak brightness, an Exynos 2500 chipset on a 3nm process, 8GB of RAM, and a 4,900mAh battery. The Exynos 2500 is a step up from the Exynos 2400 in the S25 FE, with a beefed-up AMD RDNA 3-based GPU and a more capable NPU.

Designer: Samsung

One of the new One UI 9 features making its debut here is My FanCam, which automatically tracks a person in a video by zooming in and keeping them centered in frame. It works with videos already in your gallery, not just footage shot in a special mode. Record someone’s performance or activity, pull it up afterward, and My FanCam can isolate the subject for a clean, social-ready clip without any manual editing.

Horizon Lock addresses a different problem: shaky handheld footage. It keeps video level even if the phone rotates up to 360° during recording, which is useful for any situation where you’re moving while shooting and can’t stop to stabilize the frame. Add that to Photo Assist’s AI editing tools, and you have a camera experience that does more of the grunt work automatically than any previous FE has offered.

The triple rear camera system uses a 50MP main sensor with OIS, a 12MP ultrawide at 123°, and an 8MP telephoto with 3x optical zoom and up to 30x digital zoom, all with OIS. The 12MP front camera handles video calls and selfies with a wide 85° field of view. The camera design itself has been updated to align more closely with the rest of the S26 series, which gives the FE a less immediately distinct look from the higher-end models.

Charging is 45W wired, which gets the 4,900mAh battery to 69% in approximately 30 minutes. Wireless charging tops out at 15W, and Wireless PowerShare is included. The build uses Gorilla Glass Victus+ on both the front and back, an aluminum frame, and IP68 water resistance. Connectivity covers Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, and 5G, along with an in-display fingerprint sensor.

Seven years of OS updates and security patches are promised, which extends the phone’s useful life considerably. In Pistachio, Blueberry, and Graphite, it goes on sale September 4, with select carriers beginning a day earlier. It’s the FE format doing what it’s always done, just this time with a software stack the rest of the lineup hasn’t caught up to yet.

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Fitbit Just Made Snorlax the Motivation Your Sleep Tracker Was Missing

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Sleep tracking has a credibility problem. Wearables can tell you exactly how long you were in light sleep and precisely when your deep sleep dropped off, but none of that information comes with a reason to care about it enough to actually change your behavior. The Fitbit Air Special Edition Pokémon Sleep, at $129.99, takes a different approach to motivation: your sleep score feeds directly into a game, and Snorlax is waiting.

The Pokémon Sleep app already had this mechanic before the Fitbit collaboration. Sleep well, generate Drowsy Power, and more Pokémon show up around Snorlax in the morning with their own sleeping styles to research and log. What the Fitbit Air adds is a wrist-based tracker that captures the data automatically, running it through Google Health, which then pipes it into the app via Health Connect on Android or Apple Health on iOS. You wake up and open the app. That’s it.

Designer: Google, The Pokemon Company

The hardware is the same screenless Fitbit Air that launched in May 2026, which is worth understanding. It weighs 12 grams with the band, resists water to 50 meters, monitors heart rate, SpO2, skin temperature, and atrial fibrillation, and the battery runs up to seven days between charges. A five-minute charge returns roughly one day of use. None of those specs changed for the special edition. What changed is the band, the packaging, and a three-month Google Health Premium trial included in the box.

The band is Sleepy Blue, a soft textile with a champagne-gold stainless-steel buckle and a silk-printed Sleeping Pikachu label on the strap. The micro-adjustable design is the same as the standard model, designed to sit close enough that it doesn’t shift during sleep without feeling restrictive. Sleep tracking only works reliably if the tracker stays in contact with your skin all night, so the comfort argument isn’t incidental.

Naps count toward Drowsy Power, not just overnight sessions, which is a small but genuinely useful detail. It means the tracker rewards rest across the full day rather than treating a nine-hour night as the only path to progress. People with irregular schedules or who rely on afternoon naps get the same feedback loop as anyone with a consistent bedtime routine.

This is Pokémon’s 30th anniversary, which is part of why the collaboration exists in the form it does. The Snorlax-themed packaging, the silk-print label, and the Sleepy Blue colorway are all timed to that milestone rather than representing a permanent product direction. It’s a collector’s object that also happens to work as a serious sleep tracker, and the two things coexist without competing.

The Fitbit Air Special Edition Pokémon Sleep is available for preorder at the Google Store and Target, with shipping starting September 15. It’s a $30 premium over the standard Air, for a band that looks like a Pokémon game, a branded box, and a trial of the coaching service. For Pokémon Sleep players who need a new tracker anyway, that math is fairly simple.

The post Fitbit Just Made Snorlax the Motivation Your Sleep Tracker Was Missing first appeared on Yanko Design.

Rope Replaced Every Screw and Dowel in This $77 Wooden Folding Stool

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Most furniture relies on hardware you can’t see to hold everything together. Screws, bolts, dowels, and adhesives do the invisible work that keeps chairs and stools from coming apart. The Rope Stool does without all of it. Designed as part of a craft exchange between Tottori, Japan, and Gothenburg, Sweden, it holds its flat cedar boards together through rope tension alone, and it folds flat when it’s done.

The exchange that produced it ran for three weeks in Tottori Prefecture, where six Swedish creatives came to collaborate with local Japanese craftspeople. The initiative was organized by Oshinsha, a Japanese retailer dedicated to promoting the work of local artisans, with funding from both countries. It was structured as a genuine creative residency, not a cultural showcase, and the stool that came out of it reflects that difference.

Designers: Esbjorn Grip, Junsei Fujimoto

The brief handed to the pair who made the Rope Stool was deliberately restrictive: create a piece of furniture from a single, repeatable wooden element. What they arrived at is a seat made entirely from identical flat boards of Japanese cedar, no custom-cut components, no specialized hardware. The rope pulls them into formation and holds them there, tight enough to carry a person’s weight, loose enough to release when you want to pack up and leave.

That packing-up quality is one of the things that makes the stool more than a design exercise. A seat that disassembles into a flat bundle of boards and a length of rope is genuinely portable in a way that most stools aren’t. You can bring it to a market stall, a workshop, an outdoor event, or anywhere that needs a seat more than it needs a chair stored permanently in the corner. The rope tension is what creates the rigidity; without it, the parts stay separate and flat.

The cedar itself is a considered choice. Japanese cedar, or sugi, is one of the most widely used traditional wood materials in Japan, valued for its light weight, straight grain, and durability. Flat boards cut from it are uniform enough to be truly interchangeable, which is the point of the single-repeatable-element brief. Each board in the stool is the same as the others, and the rope is what differentiates a pile of boards from something you can sit on.

There’s a conceptual clarity to the construction that most furniture doesn’t achieve. The structure is visible, the logic is readable, and nothing about how it stays together is concealed. Pull the rope, and it assembles. Loosen it, and it comes apart. The simplicity isn’t a limit on what the stool can do: it’s the thing itself, expressed as directly as the brief demanded.

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Rock Paper Pencil 4.0 Adds the Paper Feel the Apple Pencil Never Had

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The Apple Pencil on a standard iPad screen is a competent stylus. It isn’t, however, anything like writing on paper, and for a lot of artists and note-takers, that distinction matters enough to do something about it. Rock Paper Pencil has been the go-to solution for this since version one, and version 4.0, at $49.99, adds something earlier versions couldn’t offer: a choice of how drawing actually feels.

The setup is a two-part system. A removable screen protector attaches to the iPad’s display without adhesive, using NanoCling technology that leaves no residue when peeled off. Its microscopic texture adds enough controlled friction to the surface that the Apple Pencil moves across it the way a pencil moves across paper, with resistance that makes strokes feel intentional rather than frictionless.

Designer: Astropad

The four included tips are the version 4.0 update. Two are ballpoint, the same smooth steel-tip design from previous versions, and two are graphite, a new addition made from POM material and modeled after a 2B pencil. The graphite tips have a softer, toothier drag that catches the screen protector’s texture more noticeably, delivering the kind of feedback artists reach for when sketching, shading, or building up layered strokes.

Switching between the two feels like the difference between reaching for a pen and reaching for a pencil, which is precisely the point. Writers and quick note-takers tend to prefer the ballpoint’s smoother glide. Illustrators working on expressive, pressure-sensitive line work often want more grip. Neither one is wrong, and having both in the same kit means you don’t have to commit to one style of input permanently.

What makes this system work as well as it does is that the tips and the protector are engineered together rather than as separate products. The custom tips are designed specifically to interact with the nano-texture protector surface, so the friction you feel isn’t random. It’s calibrated. The tips work with every Apple Pencil model, including the Apple Pencil Pro, so upgrading your stylus doesn’t require replacing the tips you’re used to.

The screen protector itself attaches in seconds and stores in an included protective sleeve when it’s not on the iPad. The removable design is one of the things that separates Rock Paper Pencil from Apple’s own nano-texture glass option, which is a permanent surface applied at purchase on select high-end iPad Pro configurations. Rock Paper Pencil achieves a comparable paper-like feel without locking you into it, and without the price premium that comes with Apple’s version.

Compatibility covers most iPads in active circulation, from the iPad mini to the full-size iPad Pro, with model-specific screen protectors ordered for the right fit. The tips, by contrast, are universal across Apple Pencil generations. Each Rock Paper Pencil 4.0 kit ships with the screen protector, the protective sleeve, and all four tips: two ballpoint and two graphite.

The $49.99 price keeps the entry point low enough that it doesn’t feel like a commitment. The protector comes off clean, the tips swap in seconds, and the graphite option adds a dimension to iPad drawing that wasn’t there before. It’s a small change to the physical layer that produces a noticeably different experience.

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Cyberpunk 2077 Just Got a Commodore Collab That’s Absurd and Logical

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The original Commodore 64 launched in 1982. Cyberpunk 2077, the game, is set in 2077. The gap between those two years is roughly the entire history of the personal computer, which makes the Commodore 77 either the most absurd collaboration in gaming hardware history or the most logical one, depending on how you look at it. At $377, it’s clearly betting on the latter.

The 77 is a special edition of the Commodore 64 Ultimate, the FPGA-based revival that earned a 10/10 from IGN when it launched in 2025. FPGA recreations matter because they reproduce the original hardware’s behavior at the circuit level rather than running it through conventional software emulation. The practical result is compatibility with 99.9% of the 10,000-plus game and peripheral library built up over four decades.

Designer: Commodore

Under the hood, this edition upgrades the processor from the AMD Artix XC7A50T to the more powerful XC7A100T, pushing the ceiling from the Commodore 64 Ultimate’s speed to 77MHz. That’s a long way from the original machine’s 1 MHz, though the number was clearly chosen as much for the name as for the engineering. It also connects to modern TVs via HDMI and supports Wi-Fi and USB, covering the practical bases without compromising what the platform does.

The design is where Cyberpunk 2077 fully takes over. The main body is a distressed, weathered yellow with graffiti tags, a brushed-metal plate, and a teal power indicator. The bottom of the shell is smoked-gray translucent, with multicolor LEDs glowing through from beneath. It boots into a custom BASIC 2.0 startup screen themed around Seocho Electronics, a fictional Night City manufacturer, which separates this from a sticker job.

The most compelling piece of the package is the demo. Called “The Shard,” it ships on an exclusive cartridge designed to look like the data chips from Cyberpunk 2077 and was created by Arise, a long-running Polish C64 demo group with a serious reputation in the scene. It’s a non-interactive 8-bit audiovisual experience, not a playable game, with a 24-channel stereo SID soundtrack by chiptune artist LukHash. For anyone who follows the C64 demo scene, Arise and LukHash together is a meaningful combination.

The spiral-bound user guide is another thing entirely. It comes packed with Cyberpunk 2077 lore alongside type-in BASIC programs that you can key into the machine yourself, which is about as 1982 as anything in the box. It’s the kind of detail that only makes sense if you understand what a Commodore 64 actually meant to the people who grew up with one, and it suggests whoever put this together understood the audience fairly well.

This is Commodore’s first franchise hardware collaboration in 68 years of existence. That’s worth pausing on. The Commodore 64 became a cultural landmark not through corporate restraint but through the things people built on it, the games, the demos, the music, the code. The Commodore 77 is a collector’s object, but the BASIC programs in that guide are an open invitation to do something with it rather than just admire it.

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The Click Wheel Is Back, and This Pocket Player Has 4 DACs

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The Shanling Q2 is a pocket-sized hi-fi player that fits four Cirrus Logic CS43131 DAC chips into a body smaller than most wallets. It measures 80mm x 50mm x 13.5mm, weighs 83g, and supports PCM up to 768 kHz/32-bit alongside native DSD512 playback. It also has a Click Wheel, which, depending on your age, will either mean nothing to you or mean a great deal.

The Click Wheel here is a touch-sensitive ring that sits alongside a 2.09-inch touchscreen, giving you two ways to move through menus and adjust volume. The touchscreen handles the broader interface work while the wheel handles the tactile stuff, volume adjustments and quick navigation without staring at a screen. Four physical buttons round it out. The combination is deliberate and slightly nostalgic, and it works.

Designer: Shanling

Those four DAC chips working in tandem are why the audio section matters. Through the 4.4 mm balanced output, the Q2 pushes up to 425mW into a 32 Ω load, which is enough to properly drive full-size headphones that most portable players give up on. The 3.5mm unbalanced output still delivers 120mW. Both gain settings, low for sensitive in-ear monitors and high for harder-to-drive cans, give you control over the amplifier’s output to match your headphones precisely.

One of the more useful things the Q2 can do is disappear into your current setup rather than replace it entirely. The bidirectional Bluetooth 5.2 works in both directions: as a transmitter to wireless headphones and speakers, and as a receiver that turns the Q2 into a DAC and amplifier for your smartphone. Plug a set of wired headphones into the Q2, pair it with your phone via Bluetooth, and you get a meaningful upgrade over your phone’s built-in audio without any extra hassle.

There’s no internal storage, which keeps the Q2 light and simple, but the microSD slot accepts cards up to 2TB. Most high-resolution music libraries won’t come anywhere near filling that, but it’s generous enough that the storage question essentially disappears. The dual-band Wi-Fi supports AirPlay and DLNA for wireless streaming, and native Tidal support means you don’t have to rely on stored files at all if you’d rather not.

Battery life holds up well relative to what’s being asked of the hardware. The 3.5mm output gets up to 13.5 hours; the balanced connection trims that slightly to 12.5 hours. Run the Q2 as a Bluetooth receiver using LDAC, and you get up to 16.5 hours, which comfortably covers a long-haul flight or a full day of listening without needing to think about charging.

The aluminum-alloy frame and glass rear panel keep it feeling premium in hand, and available colors are Smoky Grey, Moonlight Silver, and Twilight Orange. The MTouch OS runs on an Ingenic X2000 processor, and the interface is reportedly clean and fast enough that it doesn’t get in the way of actually using the player. In USB DAC mode, it extends its usefulness to desktop setups, handling PCM up to 384 kHz/32-bit from a connected computer.

The Q2 retails at around $269, which puts it squarely in the serious-but-not-extreme tier of portable hi-fi. It ships with a case, a USB cable, and a manual, and it’s available in all three colorways from launch. For anyone who has ever felt their phone was the weak link in an otherwise respectable headphone setup, the Q2 is a reasonably direct answer to that specific frustration.

The post The Click Wheel Is Back, and This Pocket Player Has 4 DACs first appeared on Yanko Design.