this is a weird shaped
phone okay it's not a phone in fact it can't even take a SIM card but hear me
out because the Ino pocket DMG portable handheld gaming system I think has more
in common with a phone than it does with pretty much anything else for starters
it uses a Snapdragon processor specifically the g3x Gen 2 which is
pretty similar to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 it also has an OLED touchscreen on the
front a fingerprint scanner and it runs flipping Android so functionally
speaking it's an Android phone with no sim slot and a controller attached to it
which doesn't mean that it's a bad thing there's a ton of great emulators on
Android if you want to play retro games it just means that unlike some handhelds
we've seen recently that use fpgas to Faithfully recreate the hardware of the
original console this is relying on software emulation however that does
mean that it comes with a little bit more versatility let's take a look shall
we I'm just going to put this one aside for now but we will be taking a look at
it later First Impressions very
interesting obviously it is heavily inspired by the original Nintendo Game
Boy but in addition to your d-pad your ab and your start and select buttons
there's a joystick what appears to be a
clicky touchpad and then a whole whack
of buttons on the left and on the right side of the device we'll take a look at
those more closely in a bit first let's check out the
accessories okay A little bit of documentation
USB ctoc charging cable but no brick that will have to be purchased
separately though they did include a little retro themed one in our gift box
along with some joystick caps and what appears to be an
affordably manufactured metal mug what else is in here oh tempered film screen
protector whatever tempered film means and a little carrying case ooh also
included wait is that a replacement joystick top a joystick cap matching the
body color is included in the packaging which Gamers can freely replace to show
their personality those those really
look a lot like the same color to me but maybe I'm missing something here anyway
what I was really digging for in here is
these a couple of cute metallic
replacement shoulder buttons cool enough about accessories though let's fire this
thing up oh and while we wait for it to boot up now's is good time is I need to
take a look at the IOP pocket micro this has a downgraded processor from
mediatech a smaller screen but with a more modern 3x2 aspect ratio and
apparently still enough power to play PS2 games with the appropriate buttons
this form factor also I got to say appeals to me a little bit more even
though she's a little on the thick side for a controller I assume this is the
power button with the fingerprint sensor and I assume this is a screen
protector ah ah yes let's talk about some things that they both have in
common power buttons with built-in fingerprint sensors micro SD slots for
expandable storage particularly important if you have a large collection
of retro games large active cooling solutions with the pocket DMG apparently
being able to do up to 15 watts on the processor and they both have hall effect
joysticks oh in this case two there are
some differences in the specs that just come down to the processors being used
so the micro is limited to Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 5.2 while the DMG can do up to
Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.3 this I don't know if it's s so related but this one
is USB 3 10 GB per second and this one's only USB 2 none of those things are
going to make a huge difference to me playing retro games what's going to make a big difference to me is the form
factor and the screens the DMG has a
much higher resolution display it uses a 1240 x 1080 OLED display that they claim
Peaks at 450 nits which should make for
a really vibrant gaming experience but a
really unusual almost 8x7 aspect ratio
that's going to put black bars on just about anything you play even Game Boy
games are not quite at this aspect ratio
meanwhile the micro uses exactly four
times the screen resolution of the Game Boy advanced it doesn't get quite as
bright and it's IPS instead of OLED so you're not going to get that same
outstanding contrast but the 3x2 aspect
ratio means that if you're playing more modern titles you are uh less likely to
have ginormous black bars ah yes they
both have some pretty interesting buttons on them so what does RC do
remote control perhaps where did that go
okay I had the settings open and RC brought me back to home okay hold on
does it do the same thing here
RC no okay apparently on this one we
figured out RC is kind of like a home button and then LC is your your
multitask button and some things in Android are going to operate with the
d-pad and some things just kind of won't yeah that that that sort of checks out
and then on this one I don't know I guess we swipe up for home and RC I
assume is a programmable button but it's not immediately obvious to me where it
is and honestly I don't really care I'm mostly focused on the gaming experience
right now are these but oh waa there's
lots of buttons here oh you know what that's actually kind of a clever place
for them I don't think I would accidentally press those so we got my
start and select and then there you go
okay got your little IOP space uh slide in
interface and whatever this guy
does which seems to be
nothing okay all right you know what I'm
going to try the pocket DMG first is this actually a dedicated volume wheel
wow and a button wow and it mutes it wow
push and hold you can do all kinds of stuff whoa you can change the brightness
and your performance change your vibration your fan speed and previous
Shader oh you can change shaders oh that's so cool oh they call it a magic
switch you know what I like it is this
one giant button or is this oh no that's your R2 and your L2
oh interesting
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off okay control type here we go I've
got touchscreen or touchcreen cool uh gyro aiming is supported by the
way both of these do have Gyros theoretically this is an xinput
controller so it should just work but I guess it doesn't why don't I play
something else wow this runs a lot better than the Game Gear one I'll tell
you that much oh sorry Simba sorry I see what you
mean about the d-pad being a little bit on the bigger side that is interesting I
didn't I would never have thought about it until I actually played a game but
it's a little slow to roll on it you know like when you're going one way and
then you oh actually I want to go the other way I want to fine-tune this or
whatever you know you know what as bad as this aspect ratio would be for modern
things it's not bad here there's just a little bit of letter boxing I'm I'm okay
with that yeah let's try a Game Boy game okay let's go Game Boy Color uh razor
yeah Razor scooter wow so you actually
end up with a tiny pillar box did they
tell me what to do oh dude oh look at that grind let's go boom boom woo grind
let's go woo grind
set dang it so you're not going to get
that like Pixel Perfect Fidelity that you might get on another device but the
resolution is high enough that honestly it just doesn't seem like a problem to
me okay what do you want to try you want to try dolphin Super Smash Bros melee
okay so we're going to need uh we're going to need an analog stick here I think this is really not a great spot
for an analog stick but boy does the GameCube ever
look good on this thing like dang you
know like like dang Zelda is going to
absolutely obliterate me I have never even played the GameCube version of this
game I have only played the switch one and I'm dead nice performance seems fine
I haven't noticed any obvious hitching yeah no obvious issues I mean I wouldn't
have expected any it's a pretty powerful little s so that's neat there's one more
button we haven't talked about yet a power mode switch whoa game mode Let's
go whoa Max mode ho holy shnikies listen
to that fan go let's try Call of
Duty apparently Bell map some controls for me already so I won't have to use a
touch screen up here okay here we go here we go so you want me to use the
touchpad okay oh o okay oh oh
boy oh boy oh boy okay I shot him in the
knee then you can bind the buttons to whatever you want I guess but oh my
goodness goodness
okay let's try the other one realistically it's more of a portable
emulation machine less of a I would actually play Modern mobile touchcreen
games on this so all right let's try the micro honestly even though it's less
powerful this is the one I'm a little bit more interested in personally anyway
oh what dude let's go man these
joysticks are right up in my face when I'm trying to play video games games I
was a little confused I was like wow there's some really good upscaling I
forgot that they remastered the game for the allstars
releas like dang I don't remember the
nest looking this good they made a point of saying that it's a single piece of
glass across the front so it's like kind of a seamless deal so that's pretty cool
if it was an OLED display it'd be a lot cleaner looking because you wouldn't be
able to see the kind of glowing not quite black bars you can kind of see
that right I definitely prefer the form factor this one though that is uh a big
difference man I hit the A and X like
every time I touch these it is really small like it wouldn't be a problem for
a kid but if you're an
adult you're going to notice it oh I
want to hear the speakers not
bad wow they get kind of Amplified by your
hands like naturally just from holding
it I like the farm Factor better this one she's a little heavy though aluminum
casing versus pretty darn sure this is a
plastic casing on the
DMG oh no dang it defeated by a Legge
and you might be defeated by the pricing of these because as cool as these
devices are they are how you say not
cheap the pocket DMG starts it's at $450
and goes as high as 700 I'll be it that's for a 16 gigs of RAM 1 tbte of
storage version so it's not exactly a low-spec device but you've got to be the
kind of person who knows you want a powerful Android device in this form
factor and you have a lot of games you want to play on it otherwise it's going to be pretty tough to justify as for the
micro it starts at $220 and if you want
256 gigs of storage it goes up to $249 that is quite a bit more compelling
to me but it is a little bit on the
cramped side so your mileage may vary if you guys enjoyed this video subscribe to
ShortCircuit see you later