It’s not often Retroid releases a handheld, usually landing at least 4 months before releases. Ignore the 3 and 3+, please. Since 2020 Anbernic has released 30+ handhelds including their variants. At that same time? Retroid has officially announced 11. So each time another one comes around, I’ve gotta take a look at it.
But rather than focus on the traditional experience with Android like every other Retroid has had before, I’m going to be taking this review on from the experience of a Linux user, and in this review specifically, that means ROCKNIX. So join in as I check out the ROCKNIX experience on the Retroid Pocket Mini, and decide if this is the best small Linux device you can get.
Retroid Pocket Mini Specs:
- CPU: Snapdragon 865
- GPU: Adreno 650
- RAM: 6GB LPDDR4X
- Storage: 128GB UFS 3.1
- Screen: 3.7” 1280×960 (4:3) AMOLED
- Battery: 4,000mAh (Listed 27-watt charging)
- Connectivity: Bluetooth 5.1, Wifi 6, Displayport over USB-C, 3.5mm Audio Jack
- OS: Android 10. Batocera and Rocknix are available as well
- Size: 165x77x16.5mm
- Weight: 217 grams
Design and Ergonomics:
Let’s kick this off with something simple, the feeling of just looking at, and holding this thing. While I’m not the biggest fan of the all-glass front of the RP Mini (and 5) I think the Saturn colorway looks phenomenal. It’s a nice actual white body, the colored buttons aren’t too crazy, and the shoulder buttons bring the whole design together in my opinion.
The only off thing comes back to the glass front, in that it changes the tone of color on the front of the device to make it not quite white there. Still, this or the White and Orange colorways are probably my favorite of the bunch.
When it comes to ergonomics, the RP Mini changes things up from previous Retroid devices. Rather than hold the flat back of its predecessors, the RP Mini takes this new design as a chance to add some small grips along the back.
The bumps along the back are reminiscent of the Ayaneo Pocket Air I’ve reviewed in the past, but much smaller. Just like that device, I feel like the bumps could have been a bit more prominent, but that would basically be any pocketability left in this handheld.
Overall I think Retroid nailed the feel of this one.
Screen and Controls:
Alright, let’s talk screen and controls. The 3.7”, 4:3, 1280×960 AMOLED display is small, but it’s incredible. Blacks are dark, colors pop, and I can’t stop looking at them. With the quality on this screen, it’s going to make it hard to go back from here. It does make me excited to see the RP5 screen.
Also, I know there have been software concerns regarding shaders on the RP Mini, however, during my testing, I didn’t use them, and I wouldn’t be too concerned as there are plans to fix this in the future.
Most of this is expected in terms of controls. The sticks are those great Retroid/Odin sticks with light and easy movement. Just now with RGB. L2 and R2 are analog, and L1 and L2 are kind of clicky buttons that aren’t my favorite but they work. The faces are loud and clacky, but that doesn’t bother me personally. They do have a nice and solid thunk to them.
The D-pad is a clicky Vita-styled pad. After having used Powkiddy’s larger D-pads and those Shield-style pads, this one seems a bit small, but it is accurate for me. Running my Pico-8 Celeste tests, I managed to get my best run yet at just 2:32 with 0 deaths. And it’s a D-pad that has me say “I think I can shave a few seconds off”. It’s that good to me.
The OS Experience:
The ROCKNIX experience itself is what you should usually expect, however on the RP Mini it does take an extra step to get into it. While normally you flash your micro SD card and turn it on, the RP Mini requires you to first boot into Android, but then restart while holding the volume up to select the ROCKNIX SD card to get into the system.
Unfortunately, this is something you have to do every time at the moment, but with this being an earlier build, I hope something could be done to at least make the changeover easier. If not, I totally understand and it isn’t a big deal to me personally.
Wifi, stick LED, and transferring files over the network all worked as expected in Rocknix. And most systems boot up perfectly fine. One thing during my testing though is that occasionally, my controls would lock in one direction and I would simply get a constant string of “ups” or “downs” registered until I hit the button in that direction again. As mentioned before, it’s an early build, so I’d expect hiccups.
Overall though, ROCKNIX is at a solid place to begin with, but it’s just a matter of how things hold up once we get into the games.
Performance:
This is a mostly straightforward discussion. 2D 4:3 content looks great on this screen. It fills the display and pops with that AMOLED display. Systems that are a bit wider, like Game Boy Advance and PSP, look good on their own, but you find that the black bars on the top and bottom are a bit more prominent. If you specifically want PSP or specifically want GBA, you can grab a larger, nicer-looking image on the Retroid Pocket 5 for $20 more.
Touching into the more intensive emulators, I found that Saturn ran pretty well overall. Given the Saturn colorway I bought, that was kind of my hope. I’d prefer not to have a similar “can’t play the thing it’s modeled after” experience we’ve had in the past.
GameCube for the most part works well. I did notice that in some games I would experience small graphical glitches. In Sonic Heroes that generally occurred in menus, and oddly enough it would go away when the internal resolution was set to 1080p.
PS2 was another one that was easy to get up and running and left me satisfied overall. One of my favorite games for the system is Burnout 3: Takedown, and unfortunately for me at least, I ran into a couple of issues.
Graphical glitches on the left side when turning, and strangely, when turning the screen off and back on it would slow down a lot more. This was one game I did have issues with, but most others ran fine.
And then just a couple of small performance notes. Pico-8? Native support in ROCKNIX and everything including Splore runs perfectly. Xbox? It’s actually there, and despite the impressiveness, it isn’t something that you should expect much out of right now. I’d call it the first stepping stone more than anything.
Final Thoughts
In my opinion, I think the Retroid Pocket Mini is probably my favorite “traditional horizontal” small Linux device. It’s more performant than most of my other horizontal devices and can touch onto GameCube and PS2 at a native 4:3 aspect ratio. With ROCKNIX I get access to PortMaster as well as native Pico-8 which is hard to claim on a device that’s strictly Android.
Does it have its flaws? Yes. The buttons are loud, the glass front makes me nervous about carrying it around, and the speakers can get covered up at times when I hold it. At the moment, with this build of ROCKNIX, I have found a couple of small but annoying bugs that could (likely will) be fixed over time. If you don’t need a larger screen than this, it might be a Linux device for you.
However, at $200, don’t just use it on ROCKNIX. Pulling over to Android gives you access to so many additional games. Winlator, Cemu, and Android Ports are all available there. As well as that, PS2 and GameCube run more consistently in Android (for now). But that could certainly change.
While I don’t know how much better the RP5 is at $220, if you want the larger screen, spend the extra money. But I think I’m happy to have put my money into the RP Mini. Especially the Saturn colorway. A real chef’s kiss for me.
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