During my usual Sunday morning perusal of the China web stores I noticed that one of my favourite shops is now shipping the GPD XD, and what’s more they have the cheapest price I’ve seen for the 32GB model in both Blue and Black.
Gearbest are now shipping the 32GB model for $141.09. Click the image below to check ’em out.
Read the comments. The price has gone up, and they are now saying shipping starts mid September. Sorry about that :/
As GPD’s new handheld begins crossing the seas and falling into the hands of eager early adopters, reviews are starting to pop up on YouTube. Here are a few of the ones I’ve found most informative:
English:
Bosnian Language:
Spanish Language:
This guy has a load of videos testing different games. Click here for his channel, and here’s his video for Modern Combat 4.
I emailed this chap about 2 years ago because the Revo team wanted to send him an original unit, but he never got back to me. Well anyway, he’s got himself a crystal black Plus version now and talks a little bit about it in his latest video.
Skip to 26:23 if you’re not interested in the rest of his GBA related blabbering.
All 3 colour variations of the new unit are available now. There’s a crystal black featured in the video, a clear version with transparent blue buttons and a transparent blue version with clear buttons too. They’re available from the K1GBASP store (link), from eBay (link) and also from Amazon if you’re in the USA (link). It looks like they all ship from China, so be prepared to wait a little while for it.
Whether or not this is a mistake on Gearbest’s behalf I don’t know, but if you remember those 8BITDO FC30 bluetooth controllers from a while back then you’ll probably remember that they were about $30 each. Rather a lot.
Yesterday Gearbest listed a set of 2 for $27 shipped. For us UK folk, that’s less than £9 each. That is quite a bargain I reckon, and one I can’t resist.
Click the image below to check ’em out.
Update: These are now $51.44, so it looks like the offer is over.
The sleeping giant awakes! It’s been over 2 years since JXD released their last flagship handheld, the S7800B, and things have been very quiet from the ShenZhen based company since then. Since 2013 GPD have stolen the show, releasing 3 seriously good handhelds and dominating the market in cheap Android portables.
I would like to think that JXD have taken this time to reflect, to hone their skills and put some real thought into a new product. Looking at their S192, it does look as though they may have upped their game from the creaky and sometimes unreliable products of yesteryear.
You could say they have actually gone one step further than GPD with their new machine by deciding to utilise Nvidia’s previous flagship SoC, the Tegra K1, instead of the China made processors that usually power these things. The console also comes with a full HD 7″ screen, 2 cameras, at least 16GB internal memory, a 10,000mah cell and will run Android 5.0 out of the box.
But if JXD have upped their game, then they’ve also upped their prices to match. While their S192 is not officially released yet, the price touted on their website is a whopping $269, and vendors currently offering pre-orders are mostly exceeding that price tag.
The machine is due to be released either late December or early in the new year and a few sites have listed it already. The cheapest vendors I have found are offering pre-orders for $299.
Too rich for my blood!
Kickstarter link —> click
Update 14/1/16
Unfortunately this thing fell well short of its €190,000 goal, pulling in only €49,000 before funding ended. That’s a shame.
It must be nearly time, in the past couple of days JXD have uploaded a bunch of videos demoing their new flagship in action. For whatever reason, the videos are very GTA heavy, show casing San Andreas, Vice City, ChinaTown Wars and GTA3. There’s also a video of Half Life 2 for good measure.
The cheapest shop currently taking pre-orders is GearBest, as far as I know. Their $299.89 price tag is still rather more than I’d be willing to pay, but if you’re interested click here.
I dare say JXD will be uploading more videos in the run up to launch date, whenever that might be, so keep tabs on their channel their channel for more.
Sort of…
In all seriousness, I can’t imagine the amount of work it has taken to get to this stage, so kudos to them.
It seems ED has been in Greece recently checking out the plant that are producing the cases. The molds are done, but they require tweaking to get a better finish than the cases that housed yesteryear’s Pandora.
Release date? Not for a long while yet…
Click here to read the latest update in full.
Hands up who’d old enough to remember the ZX Spectrum? I am, just about. One of my friends had one in the late 80s or early 90s and I remember going to his to play Skool Daze on it. I tried to convince him to dig it out a few years ago but his mum had given it away, shame.
It seems Sir Clive Sinclair is to revive the ancient beast, albeit in handheld form. the ZX Spectrum Vega Plus is to be made by Retro Computers Ltd, a company of which Mr. Sinclair is a stakeholder. They’re based in Luton in the UK, and the device is actually going to be made here too apparently.
The hardware has been designed by Chris Smith, a former ZX Spectrum games developer, but specifics on what is powering it are not available as far as I can see. I would assume it is all done in emulation since it would only take a very low power processor to run any of the ~10,000 ZX Spectrum games freely available to download. The device comes pre-loaded with 1000 games, but you can load your own to the machine at will via the SD card slot.
According to the Indiegogo campaign page the console is ready and prototype units are about to go in to production. For £100 (~$150) you can have your very own in a choice of colours, and you’ll only have to wait until September this year for it to be delivered. This is how a crowd sourcing project should be done! Though I guess that’s easy to say when the founder already loaded…
It won’t come as a surprise to anyone though that this era of games is already playable pretty much flawlessly on a ton of handhelds already released. Even the GP32 released in 2001 does a pretty good job. There’s about a month left on the campaign and it has so far raised about half of the £100,000 requirement, so it looks as though enough people are interested in this thing for it to go ahead anyway. Yay, I suppose?!
It started in December 2015 as a bit of back and forth between GPD staff and the community of the Dingoonity boards – talk of the possibility in them building a Windows 10 handheld. Some (very) rough ideas were posted by the GPD team and discussion begun.
61 pages later and things have really begun to take shape.
The project is officially go, and an Indiegogo campaign has begun to raise the capital to make it happen. I must admit, given GPD’s good track record and obviously decent R&D budget I don’t know why crowd funding is required to get this thing off the ground. I suppose this is a machine with more of a niche market than an Android Handheld, and more expensive hardware is required to power it – so the risk for GPD is greater.
Update: If you check the comments, you’ll see that Kendy from GPD has stated that the project will go ahead whether the target is reached or not – so no worries there 
The GPD Win, as it’s called, is powered by an Intel Atom X5-Z8500 and 4GB of RAM. It’ll house a 5.5″ 720 display, 64GB of eMMC storage, an SD slot and will of course have WiFi built in.
Being a former Pandora owner, I find this thing very intriguing. I don’t really know what I’d use it for though. It’s too small to be productive with, and Android emulation is so mature now that in some cases it will beat a Windows equivalent – at least on the low end hardware found in the GPD Win. Having said that, I don’t think I can live without one 
The special price for backers is $300, not an obscene amount in my opinion. The delivery has been set for October 2016, and the timeline is laid out like this:
I wonder what the Pyra crowd think of this thing? For me it’s an easy decision. Linux, especially on a tiny screen when you don’t know what you’re doing, is not as user friendly as Windows, and I really like Windows 10. I don’t know if I will back the project or not, but I will undoubtedly buy one of these once they’re available. I might hold out until April at least, just to see the prototype first. What do you guys think?
Check the Indiegogo campaign here for more details.
And lastly, here are some high resolution renders of the device.
Thanks to Victor for sending this in!
Update 4/3/16: As of writing, the $100,000 goal has officially been beaten. The project currently sits at $118,000 with just shy of 2 months to go. It’s safe to say that GPD are going to be doing some celebrating this weekend! Kendy has also confirmed in the campaign comments that the Win will now officially be upgraded to the x5-Z8550, from of the Z8500.
Past experience of companies materialising out of nowhere and promising a machine that seems too good to be true should tell us this – Don’t get too excited about the handheld that PGSLabs have recently announced. If you think back to the $10 nD, the Panasonic Jungle or more recently the Smach Z then you’ll know it’s not unusual for systems such as these to simply fade into the ether.
Alarm bells immediately begin to ring with PGSLab’s PGS when you take into consideration a few points. Firstly, no-one has ever heard of these guys before. They’ve literally appeared from nowhere. Secondly, what they’re promising seems too good to be true given the $250 price point (even if that is for a Basic model). And thirdly, there is no working prototype available to show.
However, there are some more reassuring signs from this company too. Firstly, they’re not crowd funding this device – it will be funded solely by investors. Secondly, they’re actually engaging with the communities over at Dingoonity and the Pandora forums. And lastly they at least seem to know what they’re talking about.
The PGS is going to be a dual screen, dual boot Win10 and Android handheld and the basic model is supposedly going to cost $250. It will work on a sliding mechanism plus hinge, similar to the Nokia N900, but it will not have a physical keyboard on the bottom layer. The hardware is more powerful than the hardware in its closest competitor, the GPD Win, housing an Intel x7-Z8750 compared to the x5-Z8550 inside the GPD Win. In fact one of the developers got in contact with vcoleiro1 on the dingoonity forums and made this comparison between their device and the GPD Win.
GPD – is pretty well-proven team of developers of gaming systems. Although GPD WIN their first device on Windows, we have no doubt in their success. But unfortunately, in real-world gaming tests with a single-channel memory z8500 almost twice slower than z8750 with dual-channel memory. We wish them luck and hope that they will reconsider their choice about 8500.
The PGS is planned to come in 2 variants initially, a Lite version and a Hardcore version.
The developer also mentioned a little about the team, and did make reference to the fact that they’re still in their formative period.
Details about the PGS team, we can tell you later, because the team is still in the process of formation. But now I can say that every member of the team is a fan of portable gaming systems and a highly qualified specialist of his field. Our multilingual team has Americans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians and Indians. Among them, engineers, IT specialists, programmers, etc.
We very much want the community understands – we realy want to do the best thing in the portable gaming world. Quality materials, quality device. From portable gamers for portable gamers.
Pre-orders are not yet available, and given that physical prototypes are still not ready then this is a good thing. Working prototypes are said to be available around July time, and the finished product available later in the year.
For more info you can check their site and watch this highly cringeworthy video they posted on Youtube.
Thanks to shizain, Alberto and Victor for sending this in!
Yep, it’s happening. The Dragonbox Pyra has reached the next level and is now available to pre-order. Down payments are being taken at ED’s shop, with remainders to be paid when the unit is available to ship. The final pricing looks like this, with 330 EUR and 400 EUR being taken as down payments for the standard edition the mobile edition respectively.
Pyra Preorder (Standard Edition, 2GB RAM) – 595 EUR incl. VAT
Pyra Preorder (Standard Edition, 4GB RAM) – 630 EUR incl. VAT
Pyra Preorder (Mobile Ed., US, 2GB RAM) – 714 EUR incl. VAT
Pyra Preorder (Mobile Ed. , US-Ver., 4GB RAM) – 745 EUR incl. VAT
Pyra Preorder (Mobile Ed., EU-Vers., 2GB RAM) – 714 EUR incl. VAT
Pyra Preorder (Mobile Ed., EU-Vers., 4GB RAM) – 745 EUR incl. VAT
Mobile editions differ from the standard editions by adding a Sim card slot, as well as GPS, Altometer, hygrometer, barometer and compass.
For anyone not following this project, the final specs look like this:
There’s still no fixed date for shipping, although ED has said the first ones will begin to ship out this year.
To get your pre-order in, head on over to ED’s shop.
Thanks to Victor for sending this in.
It seems GPD are more or less on track according to the timeline they posted when the Indiegogo project went live. We’re now in June and GPD have at least one working prototype unit made.
The video below was posted on Youku and Youtube today, and it shows a working prototype unit playing what I believe to be Asphalt 8: Airborne (correct me if I’m wrong). The framerate leaves a little to be desired, whether this is indicative of the performance we’ll get when it’s released is yet unknown.
It’s also worth noting at GearBest have this thing listed on their site, though it’s only available for customers to register their interest for as yet. Interestingly the touted price is $330, far below what GPD claimed the retail cost would be after the crowd funding had finished. Who didn’t see that one coming? 
Click the image to go and register your interest, if indeed you are interested.
Update//
I just noticed that it’s actually available for pre-order over at GeekBuying. The estimated ship date is September this year, so if you missed out on the Indiegogo campaign for any reason but still want to bag one then check it out.
Update2//
Devil May Cry video
Last year this SteamOS powered handheld arrived on Kickstarter with a $900k goal and no working prototype. Unsurprisingly things didn’t go as planned and the campaign was pulled before the end. The team vowed that they would return after sourcing the majority of funds from private investors instead. Things went relatively quiet for a while, until a Thunderclap campaign was launched with the intention of raising awareness of this handheld before its re-submission to Kickstarter.
The Thunderclap campaign ends on October 11th, after which time the product will go live once more on Kickstarter with a much lower goal. The machine will still come in 2 variants, a standard model with 4GB RAM and 64GB internal memory, whilst the Pro model will double those figures, and add 4G connectivity and a front facing camera. Both machines will contain a 1080p screen and be powered by a battery claiming 5 hours play time.
Interestingly, the team have stated that a low stretch goal for the new Kickstarter campaign will be to provide Windows 10 support for the machine, presumably dual booting alongside SteamOS. The team were at Gamescom last August where they had a working prototype to show off. Unfortunately they’re still polling to decide what screen size they should use, which means they’re a long way off a release date yet. The latest from the team is that it’ll be available in 2017, but that could mean anything between 4 months and 16 months time – so don’t start holding your breath just yet.
Pretty much right on schedule, GPD have begun shipping their Windows 10 handhelds out. In true crowd funding style, many backers are still waiting for theirs to ship whilst others have simply bought one from a store and received it already. I feel your pain (I pre-ordered a Pandora back in 2008).
Videos began cropping up on YouTube just over a week ago, and I’m sure you’ve been watching them if you’re interested in this console so I won’t bother posting them all here. I’ll leave this one though, as this is the first thing I’d be doing to mine if I’d ordered one.
Many stores are claiming to have stock and accepting your cash, but not all are actually ready to ship yet. Unfortunately as is the way with many overseas sellers, it’s hard to know until you’ve paid up and waited a week to find nothing has happened with your order. Choose your vendor wisely, or go with someone on AliExpress who specifically says they have stock ready to ship out.
I’m still undecided, I like the idea of it but realistically I think I’d be happier playing on my GBA. Call me a luddite if you will, and please excuse the shameless plug 
The Super Retro Boy from Retro-Bit (it’s not on their site yet) is yet another reason that Nintendo should re-release the GBA. Retro Bit have done a brain fart and bundled the GBA hardware into an original Game Boy shell, whilst doing away with the shoulder buttons. The machine is lovely to look at, it’s obviously as close to cloning the Game Boy shell as they can get away with, and it looks beautiful – but try playing Mario Kart or F-Zero with shoulder buttons tacked on the front and you’ll soon be hurling the damn thing at the wall.
This machine takes cartridges from the GBA, GB and GBC so it seems it’s based on orginal GBA hardware, though whether or not it’s actually a hardware clone or just an emulator is yet unknown. £10 says it’s an emulator, but that’s not the end of the world. The shoulder buttons though, god damn it man.
This thing is going to cost about $80 when it’s released but you can count me out. I hope that the success of the Nes Mini has got the cogs whirring at Nintendo HQ though… if they re-released the original GBA in a host of new colours and with a beautiful bright LCD, WiFi and access to a store to buy ROMs and SNES ports that never made it to GBA I would snap one up in an instant.
The below images are from theverge.
Click to view slideshow.
GPD’s new Indiegogo campaign has been open only a few hours and they’ve almost reached their $200k target already. The GPD Pocket is a 7 inch magnesium alloy clad UMPC which borrows its design heavily from the era of the Sony Vaio P. The UMPC and Netbook suffered early deaths when Tablets hit the market, and for me this is a welcome return of a neat and capable form factor. It can run both Windows 10 and Ubuntu 16.04 but looking at their campaign, you must choose which OS you would like before you order.
The machine has similar hardware to the WIN, being powered by an Atom x7-Z8700, 4GB RAM and a 7000mah battery but this time it boasts a high res 1920×1200 7 inch screen. Looking at their campain page it looks as though they’re hoping to compete somehow with the Microsoft Surface and MacBook Air, which seems mildly ridiculous to me given that it’s going to be very difficult do much productive or creative work on such a small screen.
This doesn’t seem to have stopped anyone though. Even after the overheating and shipping problems of the WIN, GPD have almost hit their target funding within just a few hours of campaign launch. The swish magnesium alloy body and $400 price tag are enough to woo the crowds.
GPD’s website is being hammered at the moment so it’s hard to get on to see their promo material, but the Indiegogo page is here. Shipping is due in June this year, and GPD made good on their timeline last time around so this goal seems realistic at least.
Despite not having been updated since 2015, Google Now is still my Launcher of choice because of the articles it recommends for me in the swipe left screen. Today’s mildly interesting read came in the form of a Kickstarter campaign for what are essentially a pair of custom circuit boards that fit inside of a (heavily modded) GBA shell.
Although cramming an RPi inside of an existing handheld shell has been done many times before, I would consider the process to be pretty tricky especially if you don’t have some understanding of electronics. It’s probably not something I would attempt, being a fat fingered oaf who’s not especially handy with a soldering iron. I guess these things are designed with people like me in mind, but that’s not to say building one is as simple as dropping it into a GBA shell and screwing it shut. Depending on your model of choice, there is still some soldering to do, and both versions also require some case modding too.
Version 1: Freeplay Zero.
The Freeplay Zero is based off of an existing concept known as the Game Pie Advance. Basically all you receive in this kit is the custom circuit board, an LCD, a GPIO header and some other bits and pieces. You supply your own RPi Zero, shell, SD card, battery etc. The idea is that with some tinkering you’ll be running RetroPie in a GBA form factor, without requiring any real knowledge in electronics. The internals should also end up looking pretty neat and tidy, at least compared with most DIY projects that don’t utilise a custom board.
Version 2: Freeplay CM3.
This is a brand new project that hasn’t been born out of a previous concept, and it uses a different circuit board which has the RPi3 hardware already onboard. The board is based on the Compute Module 3, which as I understand it is an alternative (flat) form factored RPi3 originally intended for industrial applications. This is essentially a more powerful version of the Freeplay Zero that does not require you to supply your own Pi, though you’ll still need to get a shell and the other bits and bobs to complete your machine. The Kickstarter campaign also mentions that there shouldn’t be a need for any soldering on this version, though that’s not set in stone yet.
Both versions come with an extra PCB and 2 face buttons to be used as X and Y for those emulators that require them, and both versions also support HDMI output in case you wanted to play on a big screen. If you read the campaign to the bottom you’ll see that the campaigners are very forthcoming about potential supply issues and other things that could possibly go wrong in both projects.
I think this is a cool product, but I must admit I’m not sold on the finish of the machine, with ill fitting inputs and outputs poking out of various existing openings on the GBA shell. I totally understand that to build a circuit board from scratch based on an existing shell must be a very difficult task though. Someone in the comments suggested blanking plates and rubber grommets to seal these off when not in use, I reckon this would definitely help to give it a more professional looking finish.
The Freeplay Zero is going to cost $89 for an ETA of September 2017, and the CM3 will cost you $149 for delivery a couple of months later. With $6000 left to raise in 15 days, it’s looking fairly likely that this campaign will be a success. I hope it is, if only to see what might come in the team’s future projects.
Little handhelds like this are a dime a dozen, but it’s not often they look quite as adorable as this thing. The BittBoy is obviously a homage to the original Nintendo Game Boy in design, but instead of taking carts it comes pre-loaded with 300 NES/Famicom Games to work your way through. It contains a 500mAh rechargeable battery, a 2.2″ IPS display and can also do TV Output via composite cable.
The BittBoy is now available over at Amazon.com if you’re in the USA, and worldwide it can be bought directly from their website – bittboy.com. It’s obviously no game changer, but then again for $30 shipped it doesn’t need to be. The Amazon account is run by the manufacturer, so it is trustworthy in case you were tempted. I’ll have one to play with in a couple of weeks so I’ll say something about it then. I should have asked them for the list of games, because looking at the picture it contains at least a few rather dubious looking titles. Hot High School anyone? The mind boggles.
The BittBoy manufacturer was kind enough to ask if I’d like a Bittboy free for review, and not being one to look a gift horse in the mouth I of course graciously accepted. Now I know that there are swarms of these little NES machines all over the internet, and if they’d been offering something that maybe looked like this then I probably wouldn’t have bothered. But if I’m honest, I’ve never seen one look quite as charming as the BittBoy. It’s a blatant homage to the original Game Boy albeit shrunk down to almost half its size, and to me it’s cute as a button.
The BittBoy arrived last week, and I’ve been playing around with it a bit since then. No need for a lengthy review here, it’s a very simple little machine designed to perform the simple task of emulating NES ROMs. For the most part, it does the job pretty well – but of course it does have a couple of issues too. As is often the case with these cheap little machines, the problems could easily have been solved before sending this thing to market for pretty much no extra cost to the manufacturer. A symptom of the fact that the factories and companies branding these things don’t really play too many games themselves, probably.
Out of the box the first thing that strikes you is, yep you guessed it, wow – it looks way smaller in the flesh than it does in the pictures online. How come this is nearly always the case?! It’s a real dinky little machine, and it’s pretty beautiful for it. The second thing that struck me is how light it is – it weighs a mere 71 grams with the 18 gram GBA SP clone battery installed!
But despite it’s light weight, there’s no reason to pick fault with the build quality at all. It is a very well put together device with minimal creaking and flush seams all around each edge. I’ve not seen this case design before, so assuming they came up with it themselves then they did a really great job of it.
The slightly oversized dpad and 4 face buttons are almost clicky, with a very pronounced travel when pushed. For the dpad this perhaps isn’t ideal, however it’s a very accurate dpad never the less – and it feels pretty good after a short while playing with it. 2 of the 4 face buttons are labelled ‘T’, and they’re turbo button equivalents for A and B. The ‘R’ button returns you to the main menu when pressed.
The screen is also very good, it looks to be fairly high resolution and colours pop nicely. It doesn’t stand up very well to brightness outdoors though, best played in the shade or even better inside. Viewing angles are exceptionally good from every direction. The mono speaker is better than you expect, going pretty loud whilst maintaining pretty much perfect clarity.
The software behind the BittBoy is very basic. There are no save states and there is no battery meter aside from the Game Boy-esque green light on the left hand side of the screen. You can scroll up and down between the 300 ROMs and left and right takes you a page at a time. Aside from this, there is nothing else to do in the menu apart from to launch your game.
Speaking of games, this is where it gets a little frustrating. How hard would it have been to bring up a list of every NES game released, used some review site and loaded the 300 most popular on to the device. Instead, what we have is a weird mix of quite a few genuine classics but also loads of flickery ROM hacks and Japanese verions, and bootlegs.
A large proportion of games have a URL hacked into the title screen too. the URL points to touchgameplayer.com which I assume is some affiliation of the factory, since it seemed to come as something of a surprise when I mentioned it to the BittBoy team. I have since pointed them to a clean and genuine ROM set which they say will come loaded on to the next batch of machines.
Looking around the edges of the BittBoy, you’ll find a headphone socket which doubles up as a composite TV output with the supplied cable, a Micro USB charging port (cable also supplied), a volume wheel and on top the On/Off switch. Also in the top is what looks like a Micro SD slot, but alas there is nothing inside it. The BittBoy team have hinted that a future revision may have this in order to load your own ROMs.
I said this wasn’t going to be very long, soooo…
This thing could be close to perfect (for what it is, a handheld NES) if it came with the ability to load your own ROMs and supported save states. As it stands, it’s good enough as a pick up ‘n’ play, or maybe something to give a little kid who can’t yet be trusted with a more expensive machine.
In summary, this machine is really nothing more than a rehash of a thousand products already available on Aliexpress – however, it’s obvious that a lot more thought has been put in to the design than is usual for such a device. From the dinky, perfectly formed shell to the colourful hi-res screen and the better than average controls, you can tell that even if the manufacturers probably aren’t gamers themselves they do know how to make a solid enough device.
If you’re tempted to pick one up, they’re $30 on amazon.com for US customers or you can get one sent worldwide from bittboy.com for ten dollars more.
