Mangmi Air X

This is an Android-based handheld that’s clearly looking to be a direct competitor to Retroid, as it very closely resembles the Retroid Pockets 4-6. Power-wise it’s somewhere around the Pocket 4, in theory able to play PSP and Gamecube well and handle some light PS2 games.

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Overall: Retroid devices generally give you a very good bang for your buck, with the tradeoff being that you need to spend a lot of time setting then up: Installing emulators, importing roms, fiddling with settings, etc etc. This is even moreso, as it’s one of the strongest systems at the $100 price point (with decent build quality and ergonomics, to boot) but there’s a lot of work involved in getting it to an ideal. I think I’m going to use it mostly to play sideloaded hacked Android games until it dies or I decide to pass it on.

Miniloong Pocket 1

Another handheld by a new developer and direct competition to Anbernic’s XX line. It’s got a 4 inch, 4:3 screen. It’s got an HDMI-out and a standard headphone jack. It’s got a good layout and is very comfortable to hold. (It’s a little hefty, but feels solid.) The build quality is very good and it’s nice to play on. The gimmick is the custom faceplate and d-pad that you can swap out. (It’s unclear if they’re ever going to make any other faceplates, though. And honestly, that’s not much of a gimmick.)

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Overall: If you want to play SNES, Genesis and PS1, it’s a lovely device. It’s comfortable to hold, great frontend, decent battery, nice screen and beautiful emulation. But it doesn’t have a good place in my ecosystem because I have smaller, more pocketable devices that cover the same range of systems (or better) and larger, even more comfortable devices that play higher-end systems.