MSI Claw A1M Review: Late to the Party

Technology might seem like it’s constantly moving forward on a curve, but it’s often cyclical. Flip phones, instant cameras, and record players have all made a comeback. Now it’s the gaming handheld’s turn. While Nintendo has always had a handheld in the market, Windows-based portable gaming devices seem to have taken off in the past couple of years, with major manufacturers rushing to bring their products to market.

MSI is one of those manufacturers. The Taiwanese firm unveiled the MSI Claw A1M, its Intel-powered handheld gaming PC, in the sea of AMD-powered handheld gaming PCs at CES 2024. The device was officially launched in India in March, days after its global release, but initial availability was suspect. Now, the Claw is available in the Indian market in three variants — a base model running on Intel Core Ultra 5 processor and packing 512GB of SSD storage, a middle-tier model with Core Ultra 7 chipset and the same storage capacity and a top-end Core Ultra 7-powered model with 1TB of SSD storage.

The Core Ultra 5 model of the MSI Claw A1M launched in India at Rs. 88,990, while the Core Ultra 7 models were priced at Rs. 96,990 and Rs. 99,990 for the 512GB and 1TB storage variants, respectively. MSI has since revised the pricing for the handheld, slashing it down considerably to Rs. 59,990 for the base variant, with the two Core Ultra 7 variants coming in at Rs. 66,990 and Rs. 69,990.

But is the Meteor Lake-powered MSI Claw A1M a worthy competitor to products from Asus and Lenovo that run on the AMD Ryzen Z1 series of processors built specifically for gaming handhelds? I spent an extended period of time testing out the MSI Claw A1M, and while there are a few things the handheld does well, there’s a lot that misses the mark. As a Windows-based gaming handheld, the MSI Claw is competing with the ROG Ally and the Legion Go, but it often feels like it’s going against its own flaws.

The MSI Claw is much bigger and beefier than the Nintendo Switch

MSI Claw A1M Design: The right fit

• Dimensions – 294mm (width) x 117mm (depth) x 21.2mm (height)
• Weight – 675g
• Colour – Black

If you picked up the Claw and ignored the MSI branding on the front and back, you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for the Asus ROG Ally. The Claw A1M arrived on the heels of the Ally, and you can’t help but feel that MSI took a few notes. I didn’t have the original ROG Ally at hand to compare, but the Claw sports a strikingly similar appearance to the ROG Ally X, especially since the refreshed handheld from Asus now comes in black.

The MSI Claw bears a striking resemblance to the ROG Ally

The Claw A1M is comfortable to hold despite weighing a little on the heavier side at 675g. My hands never tired of holding it up, even when I played on it straight for a couple of hours. The all-black plastic construction gives it a sturdy feel, and the grips’ angular curves settle into your palms reasonably naturally. The handheld’s ergonomic design and efficient layout ensure that you’re never sweating and stretching to reach a button, even if you have short thumbs like me.

The handheld, however, lacks a design flair — something to make it stand out. The ABXY buttons aren’t colour coded either, leaving the RGB lights to do the heavy lifting in terms of improving the overall dull look of the Claw. The ABXY face buttons and the Hall-Effect analogue sticks feel clicky and responsive, but the D-pad and the bumpers are a bit floaty and don’t give satisfying feedback. The four quick action buttons hugging either side of the display that bring up View, Menu, MSI Center M software and Quick Settings overlay also lack pronounced feedback.

The MSI Claw sports vents on its backside

MSI Claw A1M Display: Gets the job done

• Size – 7-inch “IPS-level” touch display
• Resolution – Full-HD (1,920×1,080 pixels)
• Refresh Rate – 120Hz 

The Claw’s 7-inch touch-enabled panel is a highlight. While this screen size is a little small for some Windows-based tasks (if you intend to use the handheld PC as a PC), it’s more than adequate for gaming — especially smaller indie titles and platformers. The display also goes up to 500 nits of peak brightness — enough for when you’re outdoors but not when you’re under direct sunlight. You also might want to keep the brightness on the lower side when indoors and during nighttime to conserve battery.

The screen is crisp and has good colours and responsive touch functions. I found myself navigating the Windows maze with a combination of the left analog stick as cursor control in Desktop Mode (we’ll get the two control modes later) and a touchscreen for basic input. The downside, however, is that the screen picks up fingerprints rather quickly, and a protector is recommended to help avoid scratches and smudges.

The Claw’s top side comes with a microSD card slot, a USB Type-C port and a 3.5mm headphone jack

MSI Claw A1M Software: More Windows PC than console

On the OS side, the MSI Claw A1M runs Windows 11 Home, with the handheld suffering familiar issues found in Windows-based handhelds. While Microsoft’s OS offers versatility and flexibility, the operating system just isn’t built to be intuitive on a 7-inch touchscreen. The constant bottlenecks, bugs, and run-of-the-mill Windows stuff prevent you from just picking up the handheld and playing. The never-ending Windows and Intel driver updates tend to make you groan every time they show up, and the handheld starts feeling like an insatiable beast that needs to be on a constant drip of updates to function.

Some OS-based issues also seem exacerbated on the MSI Claw A1M. In one instance, the taskbar stubbornly remained pinned inside the game window, with quitting and restarting the only measure that worked. In another instance, I’d keep getting notifications for an Intel driver update despite downloading the said update earlier. These issues, while small, tend to accumulate and become obstructive in the way of having fun. A handheld gaming device is all about convenience. It’s about picking it up, playing on your couch or bed, and not worrying about fixing stuff before you get it up and running. That’s where SteamOS on the Steam Deck, which offers a console-like intuitive experience, wins out over every other Windows-based handheld gaming PC.

The Windows OS and its never-ending updates can leave you frustrated

Windows-based gaming handhelds come with proprietary and custom software built by the manufacturer to streamline the user experience and act as a bridge to console-like intuitiveness. Asus puts the Armoury Crate SE software in the ROG Ally, and Lenovo offers the Legion Space interface on the Legion Go. These double as a central software hub from where you can launch your games across different services, tweak device settings, check for firmware updates, remap controller buttons, access captured media and more. While these don’t adequately mimic the native OS experience, they do help tide over some of the frustrations connected with Windows.

The Claw A1M comes with a similar software, called the MSI Center M. Contrary to make the software experience more palatable, the interface ends up marring the experience further. When it works, it works fine, but the MSI Center M, in my experience, remained a buggy, unreliable mess. The launcher presented a laggy interface that kept running into input issues. The Center M software, which can be brought up at any point by tapping the Claw key on the left edge of the display, often failed to register the left analog stick and button input, leaving me to rely on D-pad and touch input. Restarting the device fixed the problem every time, but it happened so often that I practically stopped using the custom interface altogether, only going in to tweak some settings.

The MSI Center M software presented several issues

MSI’s Quick Settings overlay was the worst UI/UX culprit on the device. To begin with, it often fails just to show up. I would press the Quick Settings key multiple times, only for the overlay to pop up seconds later. And bafflingly, when you tap on a particular option within the overlay to toggle it on or off, the touch input also registers on the window behind it. So, if you bring up the Quick Settings menu inside a game to monitor performance or take a screenshot, you’re likely to end up triggering an in-game action. 

Both the MSI Centre M and the Quick Settings interface let you swap between the two control modes — Desktop and Gamepad. The former is meant to be used outside of gaming while performing Windows-based tasks, while the latter is your primary control mode for playing games, essentially mimicking an Xbox controller. While you can manually change your control mode at any point, ideally, the handheld should detect the task you’re performing and switch to the mode best suited to it. And the MSI Claw A1M does that — except it did it so unreliably and inconsistently that almost never had the controls switched to Gamepad mode when entering a game. 

The Claw has trouble switching between the best-suited control mode

This would result in controller inputs not working, and manually switching the control mode wouldn’t fix the issue, either. So, I resorted to fidgeting with the in-game menu with the help of the touchscreen and the on-screen keyboard to change input methods or just give up, quit and restart — I found myself going with the latter after running out of patience at some point. 

MSI Claw A1M Performance: Not quite there

• Processor – Up to Intel Core Ultra 7 
• RAM – 16GB of LPDDR5-6400
• Storage – Up to 1TB NVMe SSD PCIe Gen4 + M.2 2230 SSD slot for additional storage
• Graphics – Intel Arc graphics

Before talking about performance, I should mention that the Core Ultra 7-powered review unit I received had already been used and had some software installed on it. As such, performance results could vary from that of a retail unit. Performance on the Claw A1M, despite a host of updates, remains inconsistent.

The chipset works across a TDP range of 20-35W on DC power (battery) and 20-40W on AC (while charging). These PL1 and PL2 (lower and higher power limits under load) values can be manually adjusted in settings, or you can choose between a selection of five pre-defined power profiles, or as MSI calls it, “User Scenarios” — Performance, Balanced, Super Battery, Manual and AI Engine — that run across a TDP range of 20-35W when unplugged (which is how I mostly played). Performance is supposed to yield the best framerates but drains power quickly. It’s best to use this profile while playing demanding modern games.

Playing Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut on High preset, for instance, yielded frame rates in the range of 40-45fps. The average frame rate dropped to the low 30s in busy areas or action-heavy sequences. At Medium settings, the frame rates climbed to the 45-50fps range, with the average hovering around the 47fps mark. Playing the game in Low settings did not recover a lot of frames, with the average frame rate settling around 50fps. These numbers were observed in the Performance user scenario with Intel’s XeSS upscaling turned on in settings and the game running at 1080p resolution.

Switching the user scenario to Super Battery in a graphically demanding title like Ghost of Tsushima led to the frame rates taking a considerable hit. In this power profile, even on Low graphical present (albeit with 1080p resolution), performance stayed in the range of 35-45fps, with dips in busier areas. Changing the preset to High would bring performance firmly in the 30fps range, with the average hovering around the 33fps mark — certain sections would drag it further down in the 20s. Playing when plugging in the charger did not make a marked difference in performance while playing in any power profile.

Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut on the MSI Claw

The MSI Claw A1M can run triple-A titles at respectable framerates, but the performance remained inconsistent, with stuttering and lagging a regular feature. The situation has improved since the handheld’s launch, with MSI pushing updates to improve performance, but issues clearly persist. The Claw gives a much better account of itself when playing less demanding or older games. Portal 2, for instance, ran without any hiccups at framerates consistently above 100fps — even with all graphical settings on High and the user scenario set to Super Battery.

Performance on indie platformer Spiritfarer was consistently above 90fps, crossing the 100fps mark on the Performance power profile. On a slightly more demanding but older title like Dying Light, I got framerates in the 80-90fps range in the Performance profile with settings turned High. There were some dips, but it never went below the 60fps mark. In fact, even when I switched to the Super Battery profile, the game ran comfortably in the 60-70fps range with some graphical settings turned to Medium or Low.

There are a few things that the Claw gets right. Audio is implemented well; the front-firing speakers are loud and crisp but never tinny. The haptics are also a positive and, along with the audio, help bring a sense of immersion while playing.

The front-firing speakers are loud and crisp, utilising Nahimic audio

MSI Claw A1M Battery: Not enough juice

• Capacity – 53Whr
• Charger – 65W PD adapter

While unplugged and fully charged, the Claw A1M would drain fully in less than an hour playing Ghost of Tsushima on a Performance user scenario. In the Super Battery profile, the handheld would last over an hour but well below two hours. Playing demanding games with the console not plugged in chews through the battery, and you’re likely to struggle to get one full hour of battery life from the device.

The best way to get the most juice out of the handheld is to stick to older or indie titles with the Claw running on Super Battery profile at 20W TDP and graphical presets set to Low or Medium. I could stretch that handheld to two hours of use while playing games like Portal 2 and Assassin’s Creed Chronicles. Since the Claw A1M’s launch, Intel has also pushed out driver updates that bring an Endurance Gaming feature within its Arc Control application, which promises to balance frame rate and power consumption to reduce battery drain.

The MSI Claw can handle older and indie titles quite well

MSI Claw A1M Verdict

The MSI Claw A1M feels firmly like a first-generation product that was rushed out when Asus put the ROG Ally on the market. More importantly, MSI’s first-generation handheld suffers from inconsistent performance and fails to distinguish itself in the battery life department. Intel just launched its Lunar Lake processor, and the Claw A1M’s Meteor Lake already looks outdated.

Asus has launched a refreshed version of the Ally, the ROG Ally X, with considerable upgrades. On the other hand, the Lenovo Legion Go (Review) offers more features with its detachable controllers and massive 8.8-inch QHD+ display. In the face of such competition, the MSI Claw A1M can end up looking like a pale imitation. And once you add the original ROG Ally and the Steam Deck OLED to the mix — both presently selling at a much lower price point than MSI’s handheld, the Claw becomes a product impossible to recommend.

It’s telling that MSI itself has announced its next generation of the Claw handheld running on Lunar Lake. In fact, MSI is already thinking about Claw 2, Claw 3, and Claw 4. So, if the company is already so decidedly over its first-generation product, why should the consumer stick around?

Pros

• Good display
• Nahimic audio implementation
• Haptics
• Sturdy build quality

Cons

• Inconsistent performance
• Disappointing battery life
• Generic design
• Windows-based bottlenecks
• Buggy MSI Centre M experience

Ratings (out of 10)

• Design: 6
• Display: 7
• Software: 4
• Performance: 6
• Battery life: 6
• Value for money: 5
• Overall: 6