My review of the #Retroid Pocket Flip for #Stuff: decades of gaming history in your pocket. https://www.stuff.tv/review/retroid-pocket-flip-review/
@craiggrannell great review.
I've been looking at these to replace my ageing GPD XD but I'm not ready for the sliders so I'll wait a bit longer.
@zorrobandito Do you like the form factor? If you’d instead be fine with a more Vitaish unit, the 3+ is very good. But, yeah, I had a bit of a love/hate thing with the sliders. I think once you’re fully used to them, they’d be OK. But it’s take some time to get there. (I was using the unit for weeks before I wrote the piece.)
@craiggrannell the primary advantage of the form factor is the protection the clamshell gives you. I was never a DS fan, so that's not an influence.
@craiggrannell my old GPDxd Android thing would just about play Dreamcast games, and that's from about 2016 or thereabouts.
And roughly the same form factor, but with a few more buttons on the base.
It's shocking to think that, after such a long time, the whole ecosystem hasn't exploded in super power!
@Jayenkai it’s quite a niche and I get the feeling most of the activity from companies like GPD has been at the high end, building tiny expensive Windows PC handhelds. I’m personally more interested in the <$200 range than handhelds that cost almost as much as a MacBook Air.
@craiggrannell No, the GPD xd was about the same price as that, back in the day. I know they do those crazily priced Win devices (with their insane fan-noise) but this was .. pretty much that. I actually bought it for OUYA game dev, so I could have a little handheld android device for testing on.
£219.99 from Funstock, back in May 2017.
Lovely red colour, very DS like.
https://youtu.be/s9WQ1Tg79n4
@Jayenkai no, I meant that most of the subsequent development from folks like GPD has been to the very high end. The low end market was laragy abandoned by them. And I’d say there is a boost in terms of power. The 353M can play up to PSP. The Flip will cope with some GC/PS2. But, yes, it’s not a quantum leap.
@craiggrannell What we really need is an Apple Silicon version!
.. And the promised alt-marketplace so we can have all the emulators!
@Jayenkai If there’s enough dev interest, for sure. But even on Mac right now, there’s a paucity of Apple Silicon optimised emulators.
@craiggrannell If it were cheap enough, and the alt-market unlocks emulator potential, it'll be huge for Apple. .. But would they want that!?!
God knows they'd probably charge £xxxx for the device, and completely destroy the point of it before it's even out there.
Grrr..
@Jayenkai here’s my thinking on that: https://www.stuff.tv/features/why-i-want-apple-arcade-to-include-classic-arcade-games-and-why-thatll-never-happen/
In short, retro games are not Apple games. And so Apple doesn’t care about them in the slightest.
@craiggrannell I absolutely agree with that, and it constantly drives me crazy that, especially given Apple Arcade exists, they haven't done an Apple TV with Gamepad bundle.
@Jayenkai What gets me is Apple had a Switch ecosystem long before Nintendo but never leveraged it. And it still doesn’t. The Apple TV is so much wasted potential, not least in games.
@craiggrannell Slightly worries me that the upcoming headset seems to have a lot of "AR" mentions around it.. I dread to think they're about to miss the boat, again, there..
@Jayenkai The question is who is it designed for? The Watch, admittedly, later found its audience and use case. But will the market have patience for a $3k headset if it’s mostly about using iPad apps in XR?
@craiggrannell Not when the Quest's right there, no. Honestly, I just don't see it.
@craiggrannell @Jayenkai It's clear IMO that whoever gets to the AR Holy Grail first - a rig you can wear all day that overlays retina-rez augments seamlessly over actual reality - stands to make a crapload of money, and at that point monitors, TVs, displays of all kinds become pretty much irrelevant because you can just display anything anywhere.
This won't be that rig, that's still years away yet, and when it does come it'll have to be cheaper than $3K.
@craiggrannell @Jayenkai I'm guessing the upcoming headset is aimed at devs rather than public users (or maybe at "enterprise", which is always a license to print money).
It'll have to be pretty damn impressive to justify that price.
Will they have overcome one of the main friction points of VR adoption - looking like a complete dork whilst using it?
I can't imagine Apple releasing a product that doesn't make you look cool. But that's a big ask.
Whatever, it'll be interesting to see!
@llamasoft_ox @craiggrannell I am excited to see what they've got.
..
And then buy the Quest 3 when that comes out.
@Jayenkai @craiggrannell Quest 3 for me too I reckon. Even if I could afford the Apple headset, in order to dev on it I'd have to buy Apple kit to code on.
It'd have to be utterly miraculous to invite such an investment!
@llamasoft_ox wouldn't that be a dream...
If the 3K is THAT good, then ok! You'd need some kind of super mega mini micro battery to do that, and squishing one onto glasses just doesn't seem feasible.
Then again, how big is the Watch battery..?!
But, no, I very much doubt it!