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:

  1. Battery usage while in sleep mode, has not been fully optimized
  2. Audio output is not properly routing to the external display while docked
  3. Fast charging has not been fully optimized
  4. Video codecs for game streaming have not been fully optimized
  5. 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.

Retroid Pocket 5

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