I’ve been travelling lately, and my go to device for this is normally my Nintendo Switch Lite. It’s reasonably compact, with decent battery life, and it has a tonne of great games that I don’t often play at home because my full fat gaming PC is, like, right there. But I wanted to try something a bit different, and so this time I’m living on the Edge.
Welcome to Esk Computers, I’m Scott and today on the desk of Esk, let’s give this Razer Edge a look over and see if the 2022 tablet gizmo is holding up in 2026.
It might perhaps not look like a tablet in the marketing materials, but that’s what it is, a nearly 7″ screen tablet that comes packed with Razer’s USB-C Kishi V2 Pro controller. It’s a great looking AMOLED screen, with an oddball superwide 2400 x 1080 resolution with a 144 Hz refresh rate. It’s got 6 GB of LPDDR5 memory and 128 GB of fast NVMe storage, which I’m supplementing with a 1TB SD Card, although that needed a bit of cajoling as it’s not supported natively, weirdly enough.
A slightly annoying aspect of its design is the lack of headphone port on the tablet body. The Kishi controller does give you one when plugged in, along with a passthrough USB C port for charging, but c’mon.
It weighs about 260g and the controller about 140g, so roughly 400g, so not insubstantial but it feels comfortable in the hands, either with or without the controller.
The controller by itself it pretty good. Comfortable, decent buttons and triggers, and the analogue sticks are fine. The D-Pad is not my preferred style, I’d rather have a real Sega-style circular pad than what’s actually closer to the PlayStation style buttons, but it’s not a bad example of its type. Up near the triggers there’s two redefinable macro buttons, which to be honest I’ve never felt the need for.
Apparently this has some amount of haptic feedback built in, but I’ve either turned that off or not set it up in the first place. Waste of battery life, if you ask me. When plugged in to the tablet, it feels a bit on the wide side, as a consequence of the screen aspect ratio, but if you can handle the Steam Deck you can handle this.
The speaker setup is, I think, halfway decent, if a bit bass light.
While it comes with a selfie camera and mic, they’re more there to fulfil a checklist rather than be a design focus. You’re seeing and hearing their quality now, it’s just about okay for video calling but not much more. There’s no front facing camera.
It’s running Android 12, and that’s all you’re getting, at least officially from Razer. I expected their swift abandonment of OS updates, as they did exactly the same thing with my Razer Phone 2. Still stings a bit, though. The last security update was January 2025, which is pretty lousy, so keep that in mind if you want to install sensitive data or banking apps on it, that sort of thing. It’s supported by Lineage OS, so there is an unofficial way to get on a later version but it’s sad it comes to this.
It’s powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon G3x Gen 1, another slightly leftfield choice. It’s kinda like a boosted Snapdragon 888, that ultimately performs about in line with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 thanks in part to the active cooling. So, it was a flagship performer, or near enough, back in the day, but the modern Snapdragon Elite chips leave it in the dust.
But that’s still more than enough horsepower for the usual phone and tablet type tasks of viewing websites and YouTube and the like, so you’ll have to forgive me for not dwelling on that, I expect like me you are more interested in how this thing games. It’s sort of the point of it, after all. If you want a productivity tablet, I think you’re after something with a bigger screen.
It can do video out over the USB-C port, so my grand idea was to hook it up to this ancient Dell hub in order to give me a way to do some video capture from it, as well as hook up a mouse and keyboard, an Xbox joypad, and pass the video through to a portable monitor.
Initially I could only mirror the screen out, and there’s no way to change that resolution so it’s both letterboxed and scaled down to meet my capture device’s 1080p, 60 Hz specifications. However, with a bit of digging around in the developer settings, the experimental desktop can be enabled. This works okay for productivity tasks, but I couldn’t get Razer’s Cortex App’s ultimately useless FPS overlay displaying on the this, so it’s not idea for performance testing. So, back to mirroring, but the visuals do look quite a bit worse through this capture setup than on the devices screen.
I’m not intending to go super in-depth on performance statistics. In the main that’s because the only way to get MSI Afterburner levels of data is to sideload some apps that are probably fine and trustworthy, but need a level of access that I’m a bit uncomfortable risking. The Razer Cortex overlay gives us a fps indicator, but it’s only after capturing all the video for this that I’ve realised it peddles nonsense, reporting the refresh rate of the screen not the fps of what’s being displayed on it. So, it’s happily telling me that a game running at 30 fps is being displayed at 120fps, which is technically true, but utterly useless as a performance metric. So, just ignore that green number in the corner.
I’d bought this more for it’s emulation capabilities, but it would seem daft not to cover Android gaming in this video. Of course, the vast bulk of Android games are designed to run on a decade old potato, so all of that lot work well. It’s a bit frustrating that most of them limit themselves to 60Hz, so you can’t take full advantage of the screen’s refresh rate, and in some cases, the full resolution of the screen. I haven’t played this little list of popular and / or demanding games before, so this is more of a first impressions of their performance rather than a guarantee of how well they work through to completion.
Starting off at the easier to run end, Call of Duty: Mobile somehow remains popular, despite it looking like this when opening it up. I suppose this is just the typical Android free to play experience, but it gives me the heebie jeebies something awful. Too many simultaneous upsells.
The game, however, is actually decently scalable, and works with no complaints from me at least in terms of performance. Where I will complain is that it does not allow the use of external controllers as standard, so touch controls only. This can be circumvented by using Razer’s utility to map controller inputs to touch targets, but even if it only needs doing once per game it’s still a chore, and I feel I’m jumping through enough hoops with playing games on Android as it is.
My Pixel phone on a more recent version of Android has an experimental developer option to remove framerate caps, but it doesn’t appear on this device. This limits it to 60Hz, and hence 60 fps, which this handles easily enough. Let’s fire up a few that can push the limits a little bit.
Honkai: Star Rail gives you the option to limit it to 30 or 60 fps, so we’re already seeing a recurring theme of the high refresh rate screen going to waste in Android games. Using the Very High graphical preset, and upping the fps target to 60, it appears to be holding that as far as this mark 1 eyeball can tell, at least in the opening area. As the actual action is your classic JRPG Final Fantasy-ish turn based stuff, frame rate is maybe less of a concern but regardless, it’s being handled well, and Honkai is a fun word to say and space trains are pretty cool I guess. Honkai.
Arknights: Endfield after some monstrous install times defaults to low settings and 30 fps, which I thought was a bit pessimistic. To it’s credit, it’s guessed about right, as while most of the time it runs smoothly there’s massive stutters when it goes ham with the special effects. Given the general anime-ness of it, that’s pretty frequent, so it’s not a great experience. It seems like it would be a fun game on a higher spec system, although I didn’t play enough to know if it’s ultimately gimped by monetisation issues.
I am not sure why Truckers of Europe 3 was suggested as being a demanding game. Running it at High settings seems to present no issues, although the wing mirror frame rate is clearly about 10 fps by design. It didn’t work with either my Xbox 360 or Kishi controllers, although it claims it does have controller support. To be fair, it’s not my sort of game, and I didn’t exhaust the options as I got bored quickly, and the ads are annoying and intrusive. It does get a bonus point for letting you go off road for a bit before hitting the invisible walls.
GRID Autosport wants to run at its prefer graphic quality setting, so who am I to argue. It plays smoothly, but trying to use this with touch or tilt controls is an awful experience and it didn’t recognise my 360 controller. To be fair, it’s also not my style of game. I prefer arcade racers, as I consider braking to be a moral failing in driving games.
Delta Force presents a novel graphical configuration nomenclature thought technology with its “exquisite” quality settings, and “ultra” frame rate. No numbers for this iconoclast. It plays very well, but as with Call of Duty there’s no controller or keyboard and mouse support. I get the idea of a level playing field for these online competitive shooters, but when coming from the PC scene this is like playing the game with mittens on. At any rate, the Razer Edge is still playing this and, well, practically all of the Android games pretty well.
Another use case is of course game streaming – either from the cloud or locally. It’ll handle any cloud gaming service as well as any other device, if you have a suitably fast internet connection. I’ve played a chunk of Alan Wake II on Amazon’s Luna service for a previous video using this device and as you’d expect it’s handling that perfectly fine, although that quickly becomes a review of your internet connection, so let’s move on.
I’m more interested in Steam’s local game streaming, both because it’s brain dead simple and the vast bulk of my stuff’s on Steam anyway. I’m just using it’s in-built home streaming capability, and as expected that’s working well as long as I’m in a spot with decent Wifi coverage. I’m sure Moonlight and Sunshine would work equally well. This has the benefit of being able to provide an aspect ratio that fills the screen a bit better, as long as the game supports it, whereas Luma was always limited to 1080p. This is Cyberpunk 2077 of course, running as well as my PC and home networking can support.
However I think, like me, you’ll be more interested in the emulation capabilities of this device. It is, of course, perfectly capable of running everything earlier than, and including, the PlayStation without issue. My only qualm is that the screen’s aspect ratio means the games does get swallowed up a bit by these borders, but performance-wise all is fine.
I’ve been using this mainly for PlayStation 2 emulation, and it makes a pretty good stab at everything I’ve thrown at in with the NetherSX2 emulator, which where it can will apply some widescreen hacks to fill out the screen a little better. Looking at some of the more demanding games with God of War II first, and it is running near enough flawlessly out of the box. I’ve not played around with upscaling the output, as on the device’s screen my eyesight is not good enough to see much of a difference, although with the captures here on the big screen I can see a case for it.
Shadow of the Colossus runs fine for the most part at least in terms of overall percentage, but there’s many annoying little traversal stutters as you move around the map. Maybe it’s an issue with reading from my not particularly fast SD card, at any rate it’s annoying enough to make me not want to play this here.
Wipeout Fusion for most of this starter track runs really well, until you reach this little stretch that tanks the frame rate. Possibly there’s some workaround I’ve not been able to find, but out of the box this isn’t certainly isn’t running perfectly. However, it’s good enough across the majority of the PS2 library that it’s a pretty good overall experience.
Now, the PlayStation Porrtable does fit the screen aspect ratio a little better by default, and has some really great games that are arguably better suited to mobile, pick up and play gaming.
God of War: Ghost of Sparta runs really well, with only a little bit of frame dropping when loading scenes in. The action runs at a solid 60.
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories is a 30fps experience, at least without hacks, and it’s a very similar story, mostly staying at 30 fps bar the odd stutter when loading, or maybe it’s a shader compilation issue.
I also gave Killzone: Liberation a bit of a try, and it’s pretty much the same story as the other PSP games, so overall it’s a good experience for emulating this system
Given Nintendo’s recent litigious arseholery, I guess we shouldn’t use any plumber based games as examples. As it happens, I’m pretty sure Star Wars Rogue Squadron II is about as demanding as the system gets. It’s running pretty well at native resolution, with I think the only issue being a frame drop the first time a large explosion effect happened, so probably a shader thing. Promising start.
Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance had a pretty variable frame rate, and the way I had this setup it was slowing down rather than dropping frames so a bit of a weird gameplay experience, but it shouldn’t take much tweaking to get this playable.
At this risk of angering the internet, I’ve never liked Resident Evil 4 all that much, but its running at the appropriate 30fps or very close to it on a quick play of the intro area.
Moving on to the Wii, with some games I’ve never tried. Like Monster Hunter Tri, which seemed to be holding 30 fps easily enough as I slaughter these helpless dinosaurs. This game is mean. Poor dinos.
I don’t think I have the emulated motion controls configured correctly, so I’m not quite sure how I was attacking in The Last Story, but it seems to be running well enough at 30 fps.
And it’s very similar story in Pandora’s Tower – I don’t seem to have the Wiimote controls configured to progress past this statue, but it seems to be holding at 30 fps.
I thought I’d try some Switch emulation – I’ve not bothered before because, well, I have a Switch. Although I think I have Citra configured correctly, only Doom Eternal booted to the point of a title screen before crashing, and The Witcher 3 and NieR: Automata didn’t start. More research is required, maybe this is too much for the Razer Edge.
The most exciting frontier in Android emulation is of course Windows, which has seen a boost from Valve’s work on Arm translation layers ahead of their upcoming Steam wotsit headset. This chipset is just on the cusp of being able to get some heavy hitters running, so let see what it can do.
There’s a lot of development in this scene, although I’ve not had great success with the more streamlined apps like GameHub. I’m just using the Winlator app most of the new challengers are ultimately based on. Clearly Spelunky isn’t challenging it too much, although it’s certainly still challenging me.
It’s always good to get Fallout: New Vegas running on another device. Here we are at 720p Low settings, where it’s generally hovering at about the high 40’s fps, dropping a bit when attacked. Maybe a 30fps limit would give the smoothest gameplay.
Let’s give GameHub another try, and give The Witcher 3 another try while we’re at it. It’s not the quickest download and install experience I’ve ever had, and it didn’t get much better once it was done, as it never got past this initialising screen.
I don’t think we’ve quite probed the limits of what this is capable of as an emulation device, for either console or PC games, so if you’d like to see me spend a bit more time banging my head against that wall, leave me a comment in the downbelow.
This launched for an insane £450 back in 2022. Like a lot of Razer stuff, there’s a question mark over its value at launch, but by the time sales or the second hand market have their way with it, it’s a bit more reasonable. I picked mine up from eBay for £180 in August 2024.
I thought I’d be saying you could pick up an equivalently powerful Android phone for cheaper these days, but I’m not completely sure that’s true having taken a browse through eBay. Maybe a more direct comparison would be the Retroid Pocket 6, which is about $250 and is fairly comparable in spec.
I like a lot of things about this device, unfortunately just about the only thing I’m not completely sold on is the screen. Not that it’s a bad performer, it’s a really well specified bit of kit that looks great. It’s just too much of a longboi for most of the gaming I would want to be doing on it, so in particular emulated 4:3 content from, well, anything earlier than the Gamecube will have honkin’ great black borders on the side that leaves the content feeling stranded in the middle with the controllers way off to the sides.
It’s just a bit awkward, and a lot of the later 16:9 format systems are just a bit too demanding for this chipset to deal with. The flip side is, I suppose, that the extra screen real estate is genuinely quite useful for non-gaming Android tasks, like web browsing and content consumption.
So, to sum up, it’s marketed as a gaming device, but the screen is more optimised for non-gaming use cases. I think we’ve hit upon why this didn’t conquer the market, although I will say this, if you do want one device to straddle both worlds, this is actually a pretty good device.
Of course, the elephant in the room here is in your pocket, or perhaps in your hands right now. If you have a reasonably powerful android phone, the Razer Edge isn’t really doing anything that your phone can’t with an inexpensive added controller.
It’s maybe a bit better at managing thermals and sustaining performance over longer terms, and if you are on long haul flights for example it’s nice to know you’re not draining the battery of the device that’s got all your boarding passes and whatnot on it.
However, I’m not sure that’s a compelling enough story to advise anyone to pick one up, but thankfully I’m not selling them to you, and you are wise enough, handsome enough, and well manicured enough to make up your own mind on if this has a place in your life.
If you want my opinion, and if you’ve watched this long I assume you do, while I can’t build much of a case for saying that I need this device, exactly, I do like having it. It’s a useful travel tablet and gaming device hybrid so it’s a pretty narrow niche, but it does fill that better than anything else I have or can think of. If my Pixel 9 Fold was a bit more powerful and a lot less fragile I’d not need it at all, but that’s not the world we live in, so it’s an occasionally useful if somewhat compromised device that still has a place in my toolbox.
Mercifully, I think that’s all I have to say on this gadget, but if you have any questions or want further details please leave a comment down below, and if you enjoyed this videotronic missive then consider subscribing. Until next time, take care of yourself, and each other.