Ayaneo just dropped two new and shiny gaming handhelds – the Pocket DMG and the Pocket Micro. These aren’t quite in the same realm as handheld PCs like the ROG Ally or Valve’s Steam Deck, focussing instead on delivering an Android-based retro gamer, all wrapped up neatly in a pocket-sized, modern chassis. If that doesn’t sound, well, awesome, we can’t help you.
He’s beginning to believe
If it wasn’t immediately obvious (or you didn’t read the whole headline), Ayaneo’s targeting our nostalgia receptors where the Pocket DMG is concerned to justify the somewhat hefty $340 (R6,200) price. You know the ones we’re talking about. It’s how Nintendo gets away with charging as much as it does for twenty-year-old software.
The Pocket Mini, likewise, takes on the appearance of Nintendo’s Game Boy Micro, designed in the hopes of lowering your inhibitions just enough to drop $190 (R3,500) for one of these bad boys. But we’ll get to that in a moment. First up, the Pocket DMG.
Let’s make something clear. We don’t resent Ayaneo’s pricing decisions. It might rely on a certain amount of Game Boy recognition to get its name out there, but the DMG is anything but. Not only is it kitted with extra buttons (and a hall-effect joystick), but it also reps a 3.92in OLED panel, a frankly surprising Snapdragon G3x Gen 2 chipset, and a massive 6,000mAh battery. Hell, it’s even got active air cooling.
It’ll arrive with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage if you’re looking to pay as little as possible for the thing. That’ll stretch up to 16/1TB (and space for a microSD card slot) if you aren’t all that fussed about dropping a whole lot more to carry every retro game you own around in your pocket.
On the other hand, the Pocket Micro justifies its price by chucking in a 3.5in IPS display, pumping out retro titles at a 960×640 resolution. It doesn’t sound like much, but if the Game Boy Advance is your main source of nostalgia, “you can enjoy full-screen, non-stretched 4X [Game Boy Advance] game visuals,” a press release reads.
It packs in one of Tecno’s favourite chips, the Helio G99, to get those retro games off the ground and into the heart of the Micro. Coupled with your choice of 6/128GB or 8/256GB of RAM and storage and a slightly disheartening 2,600mAh battery (to be fair, it is tiny) that Ayaneo reckons will offer six hours of life.
Sat atop the “same CNC aluminium alloy frame” complete with an anodized finish to provide a “matte texture for a luxurious tactile experience,” are four bumpers, while the face switches up the original design with two hall-effect joysticks above the D-Pad and ABXY buttons.
Customers can pre-order their Ayaneo Pocket DMG and Pocket Micro as early as today, though you’ll be waiting until the “end of October” before the former is expected to turn up at your door. The Pocket Micro’s first batch will leave Ayaneo HQ in the “middle of September”. Fortunately, South Africa can get in on the fun thanks to the company’s global shipping policy, though you’ll need to pony up to get it over the border.