Title by Zu
When Retroid officially announced the Pocket Flip 2, the banner render showed both the Flip 2 and a mystery device. It was kind of hidden away in the background, with only the screen being visible. Obviously, this led many of us to speculate what it could be.
Well, we now have an answer, as the Retroid Pocket Classic has been introduced. This will mark the first vertical handheld that Retroid has released since the original Pocket back in 2020.
RP Flip 2 Pre-ordersRP Classic Pre-ordersReddit Megathread
Coming as little surprise, Retroid didn’t share anything regarding specs, but it did share all seven colors that the Classic will come in. Front and center is yellow, featuring a deep purple D-pad, and while the X+Y buttons match the rest of the shell, the A+B buttons are green and red, respectively.
As for the rest of the colors, we’ll have a DMG colorway, transparent purple, pink, teal, lime green, and what appears to be a lighter version of what the DMG has. From there, the Pocket Classic sports a front-firing speaker, to go along with the Start, Select, and Menu buttons. Curiously enough, none of those three buttons are actually centered, and we don’t have any idea why this would be the case.
Until now, some speculated that this would be powered by Android, and essentially be a much cheaper version of the AYANEO Pocket DMG. While that’s obviously still possible, the omission of a joystick leaves some of us scratching our heads.
It’s rather surprising to see Retroid so active, considering its recent trend of releasing two handhelds and then disappearing for most of the year. Nevertheless, with the Pocket Flip 2 and now Pocket Classic on the way, it seems that Retroid is looking to disrupt the status quo a bit.
We suspect that it won’t be too long before more details are revealed, so keep your eyes peeled as we’ll share the news as soon as we have it.
UPDATE: The Colors are Official
Retroid has officially given names to the various color options available for the upcoming Retroid Pocket Classic.
The colors are teal, PKM yellow, retro, berry, atomic purple, kiwi, and the newly showcased six button option is aptly named “classic 6.”
Retroid Pocket Classic Colors
Most of the color options are inspired by the colors that were available for the original Game Boy Color, with the classic 6 colorway being separately inspired by the Sega Saturn control pad both in color and presentation and the retro colorway being inspired by the Game Boy DMG.
It also appears that the device will bare a strong similarity to the TrimUI Brick, but with slight changes in button placement. It does beg the question of what the OS implementation will be like, however. While we do see some budget handhelds like the MagicX Zero 28 utilize Android, devices using a similar form factor usually run an optimized version of Linux.
The first Retroid Pocket released in 2019 did use a heavily slimmed down version of Android, and Retroid has only released Android based handhelds as their brand name is quite simply a portmanteau of both retro and Android.
Specs and other details have yet to be revealed, but judging off the speed Retroid is making announcements about their upcoming consoles, we could see more info shared soon.
UPDATE 2: Screen Specs Reveal
Retroid is back again, one day after sharing full body photos of the Pocket Classic colorways, to share screen specs of the upcoming handheld.
Retroid Pocket Classic Screen Specs
The device is said to have a 3.92-inch AMOLED screen with a resolution of 1240 x 1080. That resolution puts the device’s aspect ratio at 31:27 (10⅓:9).
These screen specs make the device the second handheld on the market to utilize the secondary screen from 2020’s dual-screen smartphone, the LG Wing; the first being the AYANEO Pocket DMG.
Where Retroid may be able to differentiate itself is in both price and performance. Given the clear Game Boy inspiration in its colorways, and now with the device having a screen that is nearly a perfect match to the GB and GBC’s 10:9 aspect ratio, the company is better suited pairing a chip less powerful than the Pocket DMG’s Snapdragon G3X Gen 2 processor. If Retroid opts for a less powerful chip, the price of the device should be drastically lower than the $419 MSRP of the AYANEO offering.
However, we don’t know what Retroid plans to do in the end. Given the lack of an analog stick, relatively simplistic design, and seemingly small footprint, we can only assume the company will try to position the device more towards those looking for a perfect vertical GBC emulation handheld without breaking the bank at the same time.
At this point, given that the past three days have been led with drip-feed announcements from Retroid, it’s possible tomorrow could be the full spec release. After that, personally, I would believe a preorder or release would be imminent.
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