What’s the most you’ll spend on a handheld? $60? $100? $350? As Much as it takes? Maybe I can get specific. Is the amount you’ll spend on a Linux handheld different than what you’ll spend on an Android handheld or even a Windows handheld? Maybe at a certain point, you fall into line with “Just get a Steam Deck” or “Just Grab an Odin 2”. 

As the number of handhelds we see released, I notice an ever-increasing pattern of some categories increasing in their price points as well. And that’s what I’m here to talk about. In July of 2024, I think that you shouldn’t be spending a lot of money on Android handhelds. And that their pricing peak should currently sit with the Ayn Odin 2. Maybe it’s a rant, but here’s my thoughts on the whole system. 

Where Did It Start?

When you ask about where Android handhelds start, most might think of something more modern like the Moqi i7 or perhaps the GPD XD, but in all reality, I like to point back to the Nvidia Shield Portable. A $250 Android handheld released in 2013, that still manages to stay kicking if you take care of it for the last. 11 years. 

The biggest clamshell freak

And that price point is important, as a lot of the Android devices that came out that were worth using hovered around that price. The original GPD XD was somewhere around $200, the Moqi i7 and i7s ran between $300-$400, and if you wanted something big you grabbed a JXD Singularity for close to $350.

But then the market changed, and to paraphrase the smartphone sentiment of today. Cheap Android handhelds got good, and good Android handhelds got cheap. 

Feature Sink

Features, Performance, and general niceties of the expensive handhelds started showing up in cheaper and cheaper devices. You wanted rumble? They got it. You wanted hall sticks? Well, those showed up in cheaper and cheaper Android-based handhelds too. And as they got cheaper, their performance kept going up for the price.

The Retroid Pocket 2+ with its Unisoc T310 was one of the most performant handhelds around the $100 mark and it wasn’t even funny. Just for a little bit before the market kept speeding along, many asked the question “Why get a 3326 handheld, when a T310 is only a little more”. This kept up as we saw inexpensive T618 devices, and then it was a T610. And now all of a sudden you’re getting PS2, Gamecube, and even Switch in sub-$200 devices. But that’s slightly off-topic, what other features dropped?

The OLED prices continue to drop. See: Ayaneo Pocket Air

OLED screens? The Ayaneo Pocket Air, and the upcoming Ayaneo EVO both got OLED screens. Expensive right? The RG503 and RG505 both had cheap Vita OLEDs, but now the RG556 has a nice bright 5.5” OLED. And that’s $180 versus the $300+ or the EVO and it’s likely a higher price tag. 

The point is, unless you really want to be an early adopter, the features in high-end devices, quickly drop to cheaper ones in the handheld market.

The Alternatives

When I asked about how much you would spend on a handheld, that was for a reason. This isn’t a “just get a Steam Deck” argument, but rather a “can’t you do so much more with x86?”.

Don’t get me wrong, Arm has vastly superior battery life, but at the same time, the versatility afforded by an x86 handheld of either SteamOS or Windows flavors can’t be ignored. The upcoming Ayaneo Pocket EVO for example. Yes, it’s got a G3X Gen 2 so it can perform pretty well in all your emulators, and Winlator generally helps with some Windows-based tasks, however, once you pass the threshold of $500, an Ally X, a Legion Go, or an Ayaneo 2 (which the EVO is based on), will likely be able to perform better without that translation layer. And could probably run your spreadsheets more efficiently across multiple screens if you’re a nutjob that made a Steam Deck DS.

Final Thoughts

I’m not going to tell you how to spend your money. As someone with nearly 70 handhelds now I definitely don’t know how to do it. But I would recommend being smart with it. With the rocky paths Switch and 3DS emulation are going through, spending $300 for an Odin 2 will likely net you 90% of the performance you’ll get for $500+ in any G3X G2 handheld.

Going forward, unless there’s a specific feature or something you have to have in a device that costs a month’s rent (x86 is worse; Kun), you’re likely to find something that parodies those features for a lot less. If I had $800 to spend on an Android handheld, I’d probably buy something like an Ayaneo Pocket Air that does basically everything I need on an Android device. The other $500? I don’t know… a Balto X2? At least then I can finally go experience grass for the first time.

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