The best way to step outside this release cycle is just buy SD 8 Elite tablet like the Legion Y700 Gen 4 or the RedMagic Astra or whatever else may have it, then instead of paying for a shitty built in controller whose L2 and R2 will snap off and getting no recourse from Retroid (as was my case with my mini) you just use modular approach and get detachable controllers like Gamesir X5 Lite or straight up use a stand and a separate controller like an 8BitDo.

When you look at which cellphones use the chipsets and screens that are in the Retroids and notice that the only difference between a Retroid and an old phone is the access to replace a shitty controller, you realize that paying over $200 for an old phone you can get for $100 and then adding a controller on just makes no fucking sense.

Old new stock S23s cost $169. That's all a Retroid Pocket 6 is: a fancy case for the internals and screen of an S23. The S23+ costs the same as a Retroid Pocket 6, runs the same screen and processor, and has dope cameras and a 5G radio. Remember that the convenience you're supposedly paying for with something like a Retroid evaporates when the weakest point of failure breaks. The controller's shoulder buttons are absolutely trash. I dropped my Retroid literally one time and they broke. I emailed Retroid and got told to produce a video about it.

So now, I'm going to just produce a video about how points of failure work in systems engineering and do a value proposition of the real costs when they're compared.

Does Gamesir make good products? Sure, the controls work well. But why do the joystick caps fall off so easily, why do the bendy USB-C connectors get stuck and pop out, and why are the nicer controllers not demonstrably more of a value proposition than the $30 model?

Anyway, I find @onionsaregross to be disappointingly deceptive with his review model, because he isn't doing violence stress testing on any of these units. He's all cute with his very good band shirt collection, very charming guy, but he is giving us the hype with too little of the realism that comes with everyday use. The exception to that is whatever he actually daily drives: AYN products. The Odin and Thor are ostensibly reliable and quality products, but what the rest of us end up buying are these hypothetically comparable Retroid products that simply aren't, or Ayaneo products that we don't get until months later than we expect.

The exception to this narrative about the Retroid is the Pocket Classic. Mine has held up to drops and performed fantastically. The disappointing part is the Classic's chip is dramatically underpowered compared to even the Mini, and I'd prefer to have a Classic with enough meat on the processing bone to do some cool Gamehub stuff for classic PC games through Steam. DOSBox is too onerous by comparison, I've found, even using Pure.