5 hours Ago By Alice Clarke
All we really want in life is something that will gently ladle our arses and give us back support while we game. For most of us, this will be a chair. The cynical part of me wants to see gamer chairs as just another expensive accessory that companies market to people in a hobby where some have disposable income to spend on an expensive pursuit.
The carbon fibre aerodynamic water bottle cage of gaming. The only problem is that gamer chairs genuinely make a difference for comfort and posture for the people they’re designed for, and who are in a position to take full advantage of them (much like the fancy water bottle cages, I guess). Having used gamer chairs for years, you will never be able to drag my slouching spine back to a cheapo office chair.
Most gamer chairs are padded, with a vinyl shell. This makes them pretty and washable, but gamers can be a sweaty bunch, and a vinyl chair in summer is a one-way ticket to swamp-arse. Enter the , which is like the poor man’s Herman Miller chair, with gamer-like elements.
Like if the Herman Miller chair was competing for Sweden in Eurovision. I love that the colour options appear to be black, grey, bisexual goth, and transgender flag (but make it aesthetic). I’ve used the AndaSeat X-Air Pro Mesh Gaming Chair for the last month, and while my experience has been quite mixed, I’ve mostly really liked sitting in it.
Building experience I’m sure that writing easy-to-follow instructions for chair construction is really difficult. Same with making sure that all the chair parts in the box are fully consistent with the instructions. Unfortunately, those are two very important things for a $699 chair to have, regardless of the R&D difficulty.
AndaSeat has not achieved that here. My wife and I took a while to construct the chair, and a lot of “ok, but do you think it means THIS or THAT?” conferring took place. I taught my baby daughter new swear words during this time.
We managed to get it done in around 30-40 minutes. These instructions are not the worst I’ve seen, but it’s also a decent step away from the best. One thing that really surprised me during construction was how cheap each part felt.
This is an expensive chair. $700 is not chump change. Yet most of the chair felt cheap and plasticky.
The building experience isn’t wholly bad, it just feels like it was an afterthought in the creation process, rather than the first thing someone will do with their purchase. It was generally not a great introduction to the AndaSeat chair. Adjustment experience I really loved how the back of the AndaSeat chair was able to be adjusted up and down.
It meant that it would fit my back and my wife’s back almost perfectly. I busted it up for me and it felt amazing. But I then went to show my wife how it could go up and down so it could adjust for her, and the adjustment mechanism just never worked again.
I could lift it up, but it wouldn’t stay. I emailed AndaSeat to ask if I was doing it wrong and the person who replied said (paraphrasing) that it did that sometimes, and he would ask if there was a way to fix it. He never replied again.
A month later, I still haven’t been able to adjust it properly again. I just pick it up when I sit down and let my back hold it there, and then it falls back down again when I move. The arm rests adjust in five directions, which sounds swell on paper, but adjusting it is like playing 5D chess.
It’s not intuitive, and is overcomplicated. It’s also really easy to bump them and ruin the configuration. Having used a Secret Lab chair for ages, which adjusts so easily and stays where you put it, this feels like a massive downgrade.
Being able to adjust so many parts in so many ways is a big selling point of the AndaSeat X-Air Pro Mesh Gaming Chair, but the parts that work don’t always work in a way that’s helpful or easy. The adjustment mechanisms also feel really flimsy. Obviously I haven’t tested them long-term, but I can see the arm rest adjustments soon going the way of the back rest height adjuster.
Comfort Here’s where the AndaSeat X-Air Pro Mesh Gaming Chair is a viking. This chair is . When I’m able to adjust it just the way I like it, it feels like I’m sitting on a cloud that cares about lumbar support.
On a hot day, I’m still hot, but I don’t feel like I’m marinating in my own body heat. The curves of the back rest feel like they were made for my personal spine. The arm rests could be a bit softer, and the head rest could be more adjustable, though.
In the description, AndaSeat claims that the chair is appropriate for people between 150-190 centimetres tall. My wife is down the lower end of that margin, while I’m on the high-end of the middle. While it works well for me and my back, my wife is just too short to be comfortable for long stretches in the parts of her body that weren’t her spine.
I would place the comfort margin from 165-190 (if the back rest height adjuster works). The Verdict I really enjoy sitting in the AndaSeat X-Air Pro Mesh Gaming Chair. I mostly like it as a chair.
But a lot of the features that make it special feel more like a first draft prototype than a finished product. However, there is enough in there to love that if you test one out in a store and find it comfortable (and on sale), I fully recommend it – as long as you know that it’s going to be a challenge to put together, and not all the adjustable parts will work consistently. What I really look forward to is the v2, which will hopefully iron out these kinks and realise the full promise of the AndaSeat X-Air Pro Mesh Gaming Chair.
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