Retroid has been vigilant with shipping the Pocket Duo Lite, and finally rectifying the Pocket Duo Lite Plus announcement for those who jumped in before the Plus’ announcement. However, now that the Duo Lite is arriving in the hands of both reviewers and those who pre-ordered, early impressions have not been great.
Various impressions and reviews share a largely-general consensus that performance on the Pocket Duo Lite just isn’t up to snuff, even for DS emulation. There are reports of the dual-screen handheld being laggy when just interacting with the interface, which is compounded when trying to multi-task between both screens.
At first, many of us just chalked this up to it to being the limited performance of Qualcomm’s Dragonwing QCS6125. However, we may have learned the actual reason is because the QCS6125 doesn’t natively support the use of dual-screens. This comes from CarribeanGamerPR on the Retroid Discord, who shared the following message:
When digging a bit deeper, we went over to Qualcomm’s website to see if there were more details. As it turns out, the QCS6125 only officially supports one display being used at a time, with a 1×1 MIMO Configuration. In comparison, the Q-7790 found in the Duo Lite Plus and standard Duo supports a “2x Display Serial Interface (DSI),” meaning that there shouldn’t be issues once those handhelds arrive.
As described in the screenshot above, the Duo Lite is relying on software in order to provide a dual-screen handheld, as opposed to doing so from the hardware-level. You can think of it in terms of emulation to a certain degree, where Retroid is using a “translation layer” to make both screens work, in the same way that a layer is used to make x86 games work on ARM devices.
I’m not quite sure what this means for the future of the Pocket Duo Lite, but it surely isn’t a good look, especially after Retroid scrambled to announce the Duo Lite Plus. If I had to guess, perhaps this is something that can be saved by the community, but honestly, the better bet might just be to spend a few extra bucks and get the Pocket Duo or Duo Lite Plus.
This kind of corner-cutting is what happens when company’s try to release a device to hit a certain price point, whether it be for the sake of competition or just to make headlines. It may take a bit of time, but I won’t be surprised if the Duo Lite quietly just fades away, kind of like the AYN Thor Lite.
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Or spend less and get the Anbernic RG DS+ to play DS games. I have a Thor for 3DS, but ordered the RG DS+ for DS… Don’t see a need for any of the Duos with this combo.