UPDATE: 11/13
The wait is finally almost over. After being delayed a few weeks, the Retroid Pocket 5 will begin shipping tomorrow (11/14). This was confirmed by the Retroid team itself, along with in the Retroid Discord channel.
RP5!!!!!!! pic.twitter.com/nEADxHM8f8
— Retroid Pocket Official (@Retroid0fficial) November 13, 2024
According to Retroid, the Black and GameCube colors pre-orders will be shipped first. Not only that but once you actually get your Retroid Pocket 5, it’ll have Android 13 out of the box, in addition to the new Retroid Launcher. This is fantastic news, as this means that you don’t have to worry about manually flashing the software later.
You might have some concerns about the various bugs and issues that have been reported with review units. According to Retroid, “all previously reported software issues have been resolved.”
Original Article
With the Retroid Pocket Mini beginning to arrive to more and more people, we were now looking forward to the launch of the Retroid Pocket 5. However, it seems that Retroid ran into a few issues, resulting in the shipment of retail units being delayed.
The company provided the following statement to explain what’s going on:
Excitement is in the air, as the RP5 shipping date draws near. Our team had the monumental task, to build an Android 13 OS in only a month’s time. We are so proud of what our developers have accomplished. We don’t believe in making compromises, and full transparency is our goal. Having said that, the A13 software still has some minor bugs to iron out. While they do not hinder the handheld gaming experience, we do not think it would be ethical to ship with these bugs, and patch them later on.
We will be shipping pre-production review and developer units, starting Tuesday with the following software issues:
- Battery usage while in sleep mode, has not been fully optimized
- Audio output is not properly routing to the external display while docked
- Fast charging has not been fully optimized
- Video codecs for game streaming have not been fully optimized
- The new Retroid Launcher has not been fully optimized
We will have a video showcasing the new Retroid Launcher published on Thursday. And for the first time, we will be recruiting a beta test group in November!
With this, we must make the difficult decision, to delay the shipping launch of the RP5. We estimate that we will now begin shipping on November 14th. While this may seem disappointing, we in good faith, could not ship an incomplete product to you. We want you to experience our most advanced system yet, properly. Thank you for all of your support. Keep gaming.
– Team Retroid
While it’s definitely disappointing to see that the Retroid Pocket 5 won’t be arriving when we initially thought, this is the right move. I appreciate Retroid getting in front of any potential problems, as opposed to either staying quiet or shipping the Pocket 5 with a bunch of problems.
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I would like to see a lot more video of the device and not just game play. Taredowns, speaker test, WiFi usage even if it’s android10. I wouldn’t mind waiting if they were giving us content or working content creators giving us content with the caveat of it being pre-production.
The rp5 is android 13, the mini is android 10. A youtuber has done a teardown of the rp5, i think it was retro tech dad or something. If you watch enough reviews, you’ll find it.
All the retroid/ayn devices are designed quite similar. i doubt it is any different with the RP5. They even encourage opening the devices to exchange parts yourself. Imo that says quite a lot.