Buy the Retroid Pocket Mini here: https://joeysrh.link/RP_MINI
Looking for the Retroid Pocket Mini Setup Guide? Find it here.
Specs
| Colors | Saturn/Orange/Black/SFC/16Bit |
| Screen | 3.7″ AMOLED 1280×960 4:3 Touchscreen |
| CPU | Snapdragon 865 |
| GPU | Adreno 650 |
| RAM | 6GB LPDDR4X |
| Storage | 128GB UFS3.1 |
| Operating System | Android 10 |
| Battery | 4000mAh |
| Features | WiFi, Bluetooth, Video Output |
| Good For | PS1 & Under, N64/DC, Saturn, PSP, GC/Wii, PS2, Switch |
| Custom Firmware (at launch) | None |
First up, if you’ve been in my Discord, you know I have my own war going on right now for secondary handheld to my ASUS ROG Ally X, since I just like carrying a smaller handheld around with me all the time. That’s right, I mostly just use two handhelds despite owning a whole bunch more.
Compared to the AYN Odin 2 Mini
Right now, that secondary handheld has been the AYN Odin 2 Mini, which I absolutely love and I set it up next to the Retroid Pocket Mini to see the difference. It’s not surprising to me that the Retroid is a lot more crisp and has better angles thanks to the OLED display, but the Mini LED on the Odin 2 Mini still does win a little bit for outside gaming, although the Retroid is no slouch there.
Compared to the AYANEO Pocket Micro
Next up for me is the Ayaneo Pocket Micro and I’ll be doing a full review on this shortly, but I have to say that the Micro has a fantastic IPS display and while both of these have GBA color correction on, some weirdness is happening with my camera that makes the Micro colors different – in person, they looked the same. In either event, the OLED still stands out, but I was shocked to see how close the Micro’s display is.
Compared to the Retroid Pocket 2S
Same camera weirdness here, but I wanted to head back to the Retroid Pocket 2S, which in my mind, despite what Retroid says, the Mini is the natural successor to. If you watched my 2S review, you know that I called it one of the best retro handhelds ever made, and I still agree to this day, but my main complaint was lack of curves and ergonomics which the Mini absolutely fixes. There’s no real comparison between these two, the Mini is absolutely better in every way and I think for anyone that loves the 2S, the Mini is an easy upgrade to make.
Screen
There’s not much to say here, the OLED screen on this is bonkers, it’s fantastic and it makes the entire handheld with no bezels to speak of. It looks so clean that sometimes I just think it’s fake, that’s how good it is. Personally, I’m not someone that has an issue with 3.5” or 3.7” here for screen size, and so for me, that isn’t a negative – but if you’re someone who has those concerns, I don’t think anything here will change your mind.
However, I will say that I was extremely surprised just how good content looks on this with a 3.7” display, systems and games that you’d think would never work, was perfectly fine for me.
Performance
Let’s start backwards and we’re just going to look at Switch here with Mario Wonder and first, it was surprising how well this played in Standard profile mode with custom drivers. Turning on high performance mode seemed to maybe change some frame timing, but it honestly wasn’t a massive difference. Not enough to deal with the fan noise anyway, which we’ll talk about later.
Nintendo GameCube
GameCube is just an absolute joy on this. The colors pop, the games look super good and in my mind, there’s zero issues playing GameCube on this with the screen size and you don’t have to deal with weird widescreen hack glitching. For this entire video, I actually didn’t touch any performance settings for any emulators – it was boot up and go, GameCube is at a 2x resolution and still just using OpenGL along with Standard profile mode. There’s room to breathe here if you want to pump some numbers up.
PlayStation Portable
PlayStation Portable is at a 4x resolution just for fun and still has an absolute ton of headroom, but there’s no issues running PSP here. The main issue some people will have is the 16:9 content on a 4:3 display, which does make some reading difficult in a game like Final Fantasy Tactics, but not enough to bother me. Let me clear here, I could easily use this handheld for every single playable system on Android and not bat an eye, however, that might change and we’ll talk about that soon too.
Nintendo 3DS
Nintendo 3DS is the last one I wanted to focus on, Link Between Worlds here and look it’s the same dilemma that most of these devices have when it comes to 3DS. The second screen situation is going to be tough to deal with. Single screen games, go right ahead, it all plays fantastic here and you’ll have no issues, but swapping between screens isn’t that fun to me. Oh and this is using Vulkan at a 4x resolution, the chip eats it up.
PlayStation 2
Then we get to PlayStation 2, and I don’t like giving percentages when it comes to how much of a library is playable because I think that just makes you look stupid. PS2 has a high number of games that require a lot of tweaks or changes on any PC, never mind on devices like this. So ignoring all of the problem PS2 games, this is as good as it gets for power to screen size with PS2. I didn’t touch any settings once again, it’s actually still OpenGL and 2x here. Burnout Revenge is perfect, so is Dragon Quest, and a lot of other games, but as usual, not every PS2 game is going to be fine.
WiFi
Then just quickly, and once again thanks to a certain other company for having an awful wifi chip that I need to check this every time now, but the Mini has a great wifi chip for range and speed and that makes things like streaming easily accessible on this.
Then we have all of our previous retro handheld systems and obviously there’s no issues there. Most of the systems are 4:3 aspect ratio anyway and fill out the screen nicely and with no bezels, it’s just beautiful. Throughout all of my time using this handheld, I’ve just felt enamored with it. It’s lovely.
Audio
The speakers are fantastic on this, and I think the only concern for some people might be the button noise, but otherwise, all sounds good to me.
Fan Noise
And so let’s talk a bit about some negatives, or concerns here. The first, is the fan noise, which is expected. It’s loud and obnoxious, but in all honesty, this is more the norm than the exception – it’s like this on all of these handhelds and with this one, I would just never use High performance anyway.
Button Scratching
There’s some slight scratching of my buttons against the glass front plate, but for anyone that’s used a metal handheld like the RG405M before, you know this goes away with time. It took two weeks on that handheld for me, I’m expecting the same here and don’t consider this a concern. When button scratching is the biggest concern for a handheld, you know you’ve nailed it.
Aside from all of that, I have nothing else to say here. Even Android 10 is just fine here, I had to do a workaround for Switch, but I mean, I won’t be playing Switch on this anyway – it was more for your benefit than mine, but besides that, I haven’t run into anything else weird.
Easy Recommendation
This, to me, is one of the most complete handhelds that I just want to scream at everyone to purchase because if you’ve followed me, you know I have a buy once, cry once motto and this is it. I’ll be honest, I’ve been in a funk lately just due to the amount of crap handhelds that I’ve had to review, from straight up scams to doing 7 of the same Anbernic devices. I got lost in the forest and couldn’t see the sun, to the point where I was questioning why do I even bother doing this. Then this comes and it restores my faith in this hobby once again.
This is a 10/10 handheld, easy recommendation, nothing here that I can point to as a problem. If you want one, grab one, there’s no disappointment here besides the lack of actual fun colors like the GameCube Retroid Pocket 5, which makes zero sense why this doesn’t have that color option, but let’s talk about the 5 now briefly.
Retroid Pocket 5
The Mini here, is fantastic, and I love it, but at the back of my mind, I can’t help but wonder how the 5 will be in comparison. I mentioned before that I have a war going on for secondary handheld to my Ally X, and that right now is between the Odin 2 Mini, Retroid Pocket Mini and the Retroid Pocket 5. If the 5 is the Mini but larger, then it might win out of the three, but that tells you just how good the Mini is and the 5 is on paper. And if you recall, I didn’t have much excitement for the 5, given I’m not a fan of the 3 Plus or the 4 Pro or that line of devices.
Final Thoughts
So here’s my final thoughts here. If you know you want the Mini and have no interest in the 5, grab the Mini, it’s fantastic. However, if there’s some nagging thought in your head about the 5 being better for you, wait a few weeks and see my thoughts on that. I’m in that boat and what a wonderful boat to be in when you’re trying to decide between fantastic, amazing handhelds rather than the other slop that frankly, just wastes time.
Retroid, if there was ever a combination of display, processor, battery and all of that to make a Flip 2 with, this is it, this is so it. Take the RP5 with the GameCube colors, and make a Flip 2, I’m begging you.