The Smach Z is a handheld gaming PC with a 6 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel touchscreen display surrounded by game controllers on the left and right sides. It’s powered by an AMD Ryzen Embedded V1605B processor with Radeon Vega graphics. And it’s been in development for a very long time.

But Smach says the handheld computer is on track to ship this year, and the company has been showing off videos of functional prototypes for the past few months.

Now the Smach team says it’ll be showing off the final hardware at the E3 video game conference in Los Angeles next week.

The company has also released one more preview video showing clips of several different games running on the Smach Z. While it’s a little tough to say anything about performance or frame rates based on a 30-second video, you can at least get a sense of what it looks like to play games on a handheld PC that looks more like a PlayStation Portable than a typical laptop or tablet computer.

Smach is still taking pre-orders for the Smach Z for $629 and up:

  • Smach Z – 4GB RAM/64GB storage/no camera for $629 (list price $699)
  • Smach Z Pro – 8GB RAM/128GB storage/5MP camera for $809 ($899 list price)
  • Smach Z Ultra – 16GB RAM/256GB storage/5MP camera for $989 ($1099 list price)

Other features include USB Type-C, Type-A, and micro USB ports, DisplayPort, and a microSD card reader.

The company says users should be able to get 2 to 7 hours of battery life while gaming, depending on the titles they’re running. You can fully charge the battery by plugging the Smach Z in for 45 minutes.

Given the Smach Z’s history, I wouldn’t blame anyone for remaining skeptical until this thing is actually shipping. But it’s nice to see that the company is at least ready to show off the final hardware design in person starting next week. If anyone’s stopping by E3 and has a chance to check it out, let us know what you think in the comments!

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,505 other subscribers

48 replies on “Smach Z hardware finalized, handheld gaming PC set to debut at E3 (and ship later this year)”

  1. the price is over already at least they offer an nvidia graphic and intel cpu

  2. Pft, right. Well good luck with that. If they ship, cool. If they delay yet again, no surprises.
    Anyway, it’s nice to see the hipster white knights with their unearned sense of superiority gained from not following the so-called hater crowd still patrolling the comments section.

  3. Seems like an interesting device. Definitely buying one when (if?) it gets released.

  4. After years stolen money of the bakers, try to silence questions and the tons of videos and information about their scam (some from they own page….), 3 fake prototypes, still have someone stupid enough to fall for this?

  5. If it ships, then I’ll buy one for sure. If it doesn’t ship, then there’s nothing to buy. Simple as that.

    Of course, I’d prefer the outcome where they ship.

    2. Yep. If the Smach Z hits retail, then I’m buying it. Don’t care about what happened before that.

  6. Is it just me or are the gameplay footages in the video are just superimposed on top of a person pressing buttons randomly on the device?

  8. There are other vaporware they promised.

    Where are the Zpads?

    Where is the Smach OS?

  10. Nice to see that they never gave up despite all the haters. The team certainly was new to all this and stumbled a lot creating the haters and people just following the crowd.

    Well, good luck to the Smach team. They still need to mass produce and ship. There still may be some more bumps on the path towards that.

    1. Agreed. I normally keep this to myself, but this has gone too far. Some readers here mistaken believe a few YouTube opportunists who purposely make exaggerated reports to stir up the pot and rile them up unawares. Yes, Smach missed their release targets and so on and so forth. So what? If they succeed, why are these people suddenly infuriated? Do they actually like watching people fail as some depraved pastime, for the sport of it?Talk about being cold and inhuman. A lot of the comments here remind me of the IGN forums which can also be equally vitriolic.

      1. Wow, so people are being easily manipulated to create some sort of Internet mob. Well, I guess that’s not surprising, “mob/herd mentality“ was a thing way before Internet social media existed.

        1. I’ve mentioned it a few times on different places, but there’s been an insane effort to discredit the campaign, on the Smach Z subreddit, we had a bad case of votebots, 30+ bots from what I could tell, reddit mods fortunately fixed it, but I’m still amazed that anyone would be so dedicated, on top of very suspicious accounts I’ve found on Disqus, I’ve detailed a lot of what I found on the Smach Z subreddit, things definitely calmed down after I pointed it out, but afterwards I always try and think, why? Why would you use bots and alt accounts for this tiny campaign? And not for the PGS or others?

          That paired with how there was some failings within the campaign, it was just a perfect Sh!tstorm of haters, smears, and blind followers of trends.

          1. Seems like there’s a bunch of fake voting in this comment section. Brad really should address this.

            Makes me not want to visit Liliputing with all the fake voting going on. Just spoils the experience.

          2. The simplest mitigation I can think of for addressing the possibility that (no more than) 1 or 2 guys with access to several computers, and a lot of emotional investment in certain opinions being the right ones, would go around rating every comment on this site is to make rating a comment require a name and email address.
            Normally that’s not needed around here since the comments are few and come slowly, but I guess when something motivates 45 comments it’s bound to motivate some attempts at narrative manipulation as well.
            And in general I think using simple up and down votes for rating posts and comments is completely inadequate (except on humor sites and humor subsections), but they work out okay here because again, there are usually FEW comments and (this is very important!) the comments are always displayed in chronological order.

  11. Interesting Windows gaming handheld. Looking forward to more coverage. Although, this may be outside my budget for a gaming device.

    1. I was under the impression this was supposed to be running SteamOS, not Windows.

      2. SteamOS was still an upcoming project with a lot of promises when this one started. But in the meantime SteamOS died and was already forgotten by most. Although you could install manjaro linux and will probably get the same experience.

  12. Honestly, looking at the size of thing thing, they should have just made it a clamshell. At this point, I’m more interested in the GPD Win Max but I guess we’ll see what people start saying when (if) they get this thing in their hands.

    1. I think this design is actually better for gaming, I like my Vita, but the handles you can buy for it is almost a must have to make it comfortable, this is like a slightly bigger, much more comfortable Vita, that runs your PC games. I might change my mind when I get it, but I kinda doubt it.

  13. This scam outfit again? How many times have said the same thing and still missed shipping anything at all?

    1. The same thing, meaning what? This is the first time they’ve promised to show off the final production hardware in person to attendees of a show.

      I know they’ve gotten a lot of flak for being a “scam,” but as far as I can tell they really were just in over their heads at the start and didn’t have a grasp on what it would take to bring their product to market. Over time that’s changed and it really does look like they’ve got a real device that could ship this year.

      Whether it lives up to its promise remains to be seen. But “scam” implies they had been planning all along to bilk potential customers by taking their money without every building or shipping a product.

      1. Last I heard they were supposed to ship in Q1 and they missed again. They also missed every one of their shipping timelines last year and the year before that. The big one was the time they launched preorders to ship at the same time as Gpd Win2 ships. They never did.

      2. While you’re technically right that they never promised “final production hardware in person to attendees of a show”, the fact still remains that this device has been vaporware for a LONG time. Similar to ignoring the boy who cried wolf, it remains vaporware in our minds until the day we can go to a store and buy one. The developers don’t deserve our trust or our interest until then because they squandered it all away.

        I hope they do in fact have real hardware to show off. I hope that hardware actually ends up being final production hardware. I hope it’s not vastly under-powered. I hope they will actually ship sometime this decade. But I stopped trusting or caring after the first two years, and I’ll only care again when the device is REAL.

        1. It is simple if you investigate the product minimally.
          Home -> Merlin Falcon
          Final -> Amd embedded
          (A good power jump to the point of being able to play monster hunter world without having to cry in a corner with the wolf)

          However, the product was already taught at AMD’s coference.
          The answers are on the internet, and I guess there will be many more for those who go to E3 to see the product.

          Conference AMD:
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEp983Jt4ig

          The truth is that to be a company without any industrial support as nintendo the redo a project with a new processor and the most ergonomic design in 2 years seems surprising.

      3. Agreed. Initially, I could sort of understand everyone’s beef with this company. The immature grade school-like drama, however, needs to stop. It has blown up way out of proportion thanks to a few YouTube opportunists, who feed off of tabloid, drama, and sensationalism to generate viral news. Why hate Smach? Did they actually commit a crime against you? Think about it: if they succeed, even if the product isn’t for you, us users win with more choices and stronger competition. It is as simple as that.

        2. Heyyy, hifihedgehog! You backed the Gemini screen on Kickstarter, yes? A few months ago you were about to post some reviews about an unit you got, but you never did. You said something was up with your filming equipment. After that you never posted again on KS. What happened?

        2. Delays are understandable, my main issue is that the team still operates like students on a thesis project. When they had the display issue, they were “working” with Toshiba on the issue if I recall. I believe they even talked to Toshiba at a conference but Toshiba basically treated the like any regular customers and have the team send Toshiba parts to resolve, and this involved making the parts for Toshiba to troubleshoot and sending it to them. This along with every roadblock they hit takes weeks to resolve, and each time requiring making small changes to the board and waiting weeks to get new boards printed and tested. This just doesn’t seem very efficient.

    2. If they ship this, then I’ll buy it. That’s all that matters to me in the end.

      Although, I understand backers being salty but they should have known beforehand how crowdfunding works for real startup companies (ie. not established companies just using it as cheap marketing).

      1. Yeah, I’ll be buying one too if this ships. If it doesn’t ship, then whatever. I’m not going to have a hissy fit about it.

        1. Same, if this shows up on Amazon Prime, then Smach will get my money.

      3. The funny thing is, the people being the most salty aren’t even backers, it’s actually kind of scary how much of an effort there is behind smearing this campaign, and that’s not to say they haven’t made mistakes, clearly they have, but you’ll see a lot of strange behaviour around the Smach Z you don’t see around other actually failed campaigns.

    3. Their original scamy demo was quickly ratified when they got renewed support from AMD and the Ryzen GPU. Everything they’ve shown off since then has been pretty legitimate -especially this demo. Which clearly shows they are almost ready for shipping.

      1. It was in fact never “scamy” if you read update #2, which is public, you’ll see them clarify exactly what’s in the proof of concept they showed of in the beginning.

Comments are closed.