chuckro | Powkiddy X350 Review

Yes, I bought more emulator handhelds. Yes, I’ll admit that I might have a problem.

PowKiddy's X350 is clearly named to evoke the Abernic RG350 (Presumably to confuse consumers, honestly) and is in pretty much all ways a cheaper version of that device.

The 3.5" screen feels like it's lower-quality, though I don't know enough from a technical side to say why. It's got a similar layout, though the two analog sticks are at the top and the start and select buttons are on the edges. Like many devices, it doesn't have a dedicated menu button, instead relying on start+select to bring up the main menu. (Which makes the handful of games that use that functionality an issue, of course.) The OS is the same one that appeared way back on devices like the X6 and X9-S, a non-customizable clunky setup that puts a dozen default games on the home screen and collects the rest under "games", has no recent games list, cheat options, or ability to save sram. (Save states work fine, but games where the SRAM is required to access features and/or long rpgs where you can accidentally lose a lot of progress are an issue.) It does run SNES better than the earlier handhelds in this series (that is, playably), though I can still tell from the music that it's not perfect, and there aren't any options that you can fiddle with to improve that.

The device feels a little better in my hands than the X6 and relatives (the weight feels more right, the plastic is softer) but the buttons are definitely cheap and feel like they're going to break quickly, whether or not that's true.

I got this, tried it out for a bit, determined how I felt about it, and then awarded it as the prize to the winner of a trivia contest I was running. I hope they enjoy it.

Overall, it's very much a "you get what you pay for" ($20) and I'd have loved it three years ago (it's a mild improvement over the X6 and X9-S in terms of feel and performance), but you can pay a little more for something significantly better.