RG Nano Review: The Only Device Worse Than Not Having One
It's been a while since I bought this device and even longer since Anbernic released the RG Nano. It's been about a year and a half since it came out so you can't really accuse me of being an early adopter. But I've been spending a lot of time with this device testing everything that I could and it's not great. I won't pretend there isn't anything good about it but I will tell you now that this device is near 100% novelty with 0% practicality.
The RG Nano for those that don't know if an emulation handheld made to play a myriad of emulators and their game files. In this regard the RG nano is actually very impressive capable of playing everything up to and including the PS1 with minimal to no issues. Which is beyond impressive for a device that is shorter than a cotton swab. But as is standard with Anbernic, and other companies producing these devices, they have long since given up on making the perfect device and have opted for making nearly perfect devices with several drawbacks. After all, if they sold you the perfect device what reason would you have to buy the one they release a month later? In the year since this device was made we've seen over 10 devices made from the same XX family of devices that all have the same internals with the only differences being the shell shape. I'm someone who has been a long time supporter of Anbernic but this past year and this device has made me change my mind. Enough about my growing discontent though, let's actually review it.
The Shape
There are several important factors that come in when designing a gaming device, especially a handheld. You need to account for screen size, portability, and comfort. The RG Nano is what happens when all of that is thrown out the window. The nano opted for the form factor of the DMG gameboy but with baxy buttons and two bumpers. The shell is metal with grooves for grip. The dpad is a single unit with sharp corners, the baxy buttons are incredibly small and hurt the thumb, the bumpers feel cheap and clicky similar to a 3d printed material, and I have no complaints about Start and Select. The top of the shell is a usb C out for power and data transfer, and it lights up when plugged in, very cool. The power button is small and sits almost flush with system in a receded pit in the device. This also functions as your menu. It's a single boot sd card slot, speaker on the bottom, and fake speaker lines on the bottom right of the device. No headphone jack but it came with a USB to headphone jack dongle.
Anbernic created this device during the peak of Mini emulator handhelds. The Funkey S had come out, a small clamshell emulator.
The q36 was a small game gear mini like device. Sega released its game gear minis, and the pocket sprite had released. All of these small devices did similar, they offered a wide suite of emulation tools made in the most portable form factors possible. Each one choosing a different shape. Technically the Funkey S was the smallest, followed by pocketsprite, rg nano, and then q36, and GKD Pixel. The main difference between each was mostly the shape and who was offering them.
When comparing the RG nano to its peers you can see one thing in common. All of them have better more comfortable shapes and bigger buttons. Playing on the nano is like repeatedly pressing on the end of a push pin. Sessions longer than 30 minutes will result in pain in your thumb and just a minute of play puts a tiny button indent in your thumb. Anbernic was concerned with going as small as possible and congrats, because there is 0 wasted space in its shell. This is the most cramped board I've ever seen and I worked in mobile device repair before becoming a YouTuber.
How this thing doesn't overheat is a mystery to me, I'm guessing the metal shell doubles as a heat sink. Anyway, since they opted for the smallest possible design they went with a square screen, and a vertical form factor. The q36 has the same screen size, but because it went vertical it's overall a much more comfortable shape. The buttons are bigger and every thumb has room to breathe and you have a better grip. Neither handheld is ideal for comfort but q36 is an example of Powkiddy doing the best with the assignment. Anbernic went with sacrificing comfort for novelty. Which is definitely an option. Don't worry though, give them a bit and I'm sure we'll get a nano H for horizontal.
Now about that screen, it's 1:1 square ratio. This square ratio can work great on larger devices like the RG Cube. Having a square screen means every system gets similar accommodations for it's shape. So everyone gets screwed over a little and results in a handheld that is horizontally smaller making it more portable. On smaller devices this means that anything with less than a square aspect ratio is going to be made even smaller. This means only Gameboy, Gameboy Color, NES, and SNES are going to fill out that screen nicely.
Meanwhile everything else is 4:3 or 3:2, leaving massive black bars at the top and bottom with the gameplay being shrunken even further than it's already miniscule monitor. You can choose to stretch the scaling but this will leave many characters look like they went through a taffy puller. 4:3 stretching isn't too bad, but 3:2 like the gameboy advance is horrendous. So despite being made for portability the GBA looks bad or just too small. You can optionally zoom with the shortcut select + right on d pad but this cuts off the edges. Other than that the screen is perfectly legible on emulators for handheld devices. But home systems had smaller sprites intended to be seen on TVs. So it's a big time squint fest. The brightness on the screen is great, maybe too high. The pictures I've shown have all been at 0% brightness but I wish it still went lower. I've been using this as a portable flashlight more than a gaming system because it's brighter than my phone.
The Firmware
Anbernic is as popular as it is because of how easy it is to set up out of the box. Most of the time these devices come loaded with thousands of games with emulators already set up. But these games are usually in Chinese, and they're numbered but not in alphabetical order making it impossible to find games on it. On this device that's pretty bad as in list view you can only see 4 game titles at a time. Have fun. But the firmware for this one is problematic. First issue is Anbernic used Funkey's open source operating system, fun key has said they're fine with that. But Anbernic didn't publicly release their version after which is scummy.
Anbernic has a long history of their OS' being outdone almost immediately after release by the community. This has led to anbernic getting lazy in recent years releasing devices with bad or buggy operating systems. In the Nano's case it boots to a clock first every time before booting into a launcher menu. This launcher menu looks like something you'd see on a nokia flip phone. Thankfully it has an alternate launcher you can get to by pressing power then going to "Set Launcher". Confirm with A then restart the device and you get something that looks more like their usual emulation station style launcher.
Now mine looks a little different, that's because I changed my OS to Funkey OS by Drum76. This is an OS that is much closer to Funkey's and is available for many mini devices. I don't normally switch my OS because before this Anbernic's Stock OS' have been fine. But on the Nano that annoying clock on every launch was annoying, but more annoying was my games wouldn't launch and sometimes my device wouldn't power on without multiple on/offs. I changed my OS to Drum's and everything works now. Sort of, now I get occasional flickering. Well, flickering is a step up from not turning on or launching. But now you can see where my title is starting to make a bit of sense. It gets worse though.
The Sound
Nothing major of note here, I'm not an audiophile but I'm not tone deaf. I prefer my music on vinyl, but at the same time I don't notice audio unless it's really bad. That said the speaker isn't the worst but there may be some latency on the sound. When playing Rhythm Tengoku Silver, a fan translation of the Rhythm Tengoku GBA. I'm pretty good at guitar hero, I can't play on expert but I can beat the majority of songs on hard. But on RTS I noticed my timing was worse than on my preferred device my Retroid Pocket 3+. On RP3 I was finishing Karate Man on first try, but on the nano I had to try multiple times. It wasn't until I plugged in my headphones that I was able to get almost a perfect. This could be blamed on the small buttons, the speaker, emulation, any number of things. Whatever it was, I wasn't playing my best. It was possibly the emulation as there is some pixelation when playing.
The Emulation
At first I thought this handheld was great. I tried the classic Yoshi's Island test and it worked fine despite the CPU being at 83% nearly the whole time. Double of what I was getting on PS1 emulation. But it ran fine, maybe it stutters aren't as noticeable on a small screen? What's the Yoshi's Island Test? This is a test Bob on Wulffden does. Yoshi's Island and some other select SNES games had a built in Super FX chip. This chip let Nintendo squeeze some extra power out of their SNES games. This let them do 3d. Yoshi's Island despite displaying minimal 3d absolutely makes the most of this chip. Maybe because so few games used it or maybe it really is that hard to emulate, either way many emulator handhelds can't run Yoshi's Island well. This is kind of common knowledge because many emulator handhelds that typically come with thousands of games seem to always forget Yoshi's Island. It was even able to run Goodboy Galaxy and that's a very recent GBA game made in 2023.
Anyway, it passed the YIT for me. So I decided to roll the dice and play random games. I got a game gear one, Sonic Chaos and started getting frequent slowdowns despite it being an 8 bit console. But everything runs pretty great or normally. Some ps1 games run at 30 fps but it's a consistent 30 and isn't as noticeable on the Squint Master.
The Game Feel
This is in it's own section because even devices that all run the same hardware and software can still handle games differently than others. The Retroid 2 is comparable to many devices but struggles with Dreamcast when others in it's price range don't for example. Probably because it's an Android device. But a lot of factors go into game feel, the hardware, firmware, the emulators, frame rate, the system size, buttons, individual taste, and yeah the RG nano may nail emulation for the most part but it is genuinely terrible to play on.
The screen is too small the majority of the systems it runs well play bad because of the added shrink from small aspect ratios. GBA suffering the most. Gameboy and GBC are great, perfect fits. But even the NES and SNES with their 10:9 screens are still terrible to play because their sprites are smaller. But they control poorly too as systems like PS1 and SNES have a lot of buttons. Yoshi's island runs but the sprites are so small and the buttons too. So it's hard to see but hard to platform too since the dpad is too small for previse movement. When playing Sonic Chaos I frequently had to try and jump to grab rings. One ring took me 5 jumps because I kept barely moving too much.
The machine is perfect for RPGs because they don't require precise controls and if they have a lot of buttons you at least have plenty of time to press it. Playing PS1 is nearly off limits as the nano lacks analog sticks, and L2 and R2 buttons. You can press Select + R to get R2. But say you're playing Chocobo's Dungeon 2, select is the map. So press R2 means opening your map first and then r2 not doing anything because you're on the map. Ps1 doesn't play too bad with a stretched resolution though.
There is only one use case I can think of that this is a good system. You really like Pokemon. It's turn based, clean text, doesn't require precise inputs, uses few buttons, it's a Pokemon machine. But anything else I played all had drawbacks.
Overall
The RG Nano is a perfect example of "Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should." Anbernic didn't need to ask "Why don't people make systems this small?" Because the answer is obvious, it's a terrible way to play. Now what I meant by the title. Playing this device made me want to play the other systems I own. Every game I thought "This would be better on the rg28xx" or "I miss my RP3". If I had to play nothing but this, I'd choose to not play anything. I'm not even joking. I'll go outside over playing this.
Get Literally Anything Else
Even if you account for it being the most portable handheld it's still pretty terrible because of its other issues.
RG28XX above, RG35XX H below
I'd recommend getting an RG28xx it's $30 and goes on sale frequently, the New model has wifi so you can use Retro Achievements. The rg28xx is also only slightly bigger than a micro but still much smaller than a GBA. Better D Pad, bigger buttons, has an r2 and l2, no analog though. The RG35xx H is a better 28xx with analog sticks but and both have hdmi out. Make sure you get the ones that say "New" in their name as they have Wifi.
The Miyoo Mini Plus is recommended by so many people and it's just 50 bucks.
Retroid Pocket 3+, my emu handheld of choice. Android based OS, touchscreen, plays everything from the DS and PSP and earlier. I've even played some Wii and Gamecube on it. But if you want 3ds, Gamecube, Wii U, Wii, and PS2 get RP4 Pro or 5.
If you're willing to go expensive get a Retroid system, they run on Android and it has quickly replaced my phone. When checking social media I don't even reach for my phone anymore. It just needs a camera and a sim slot. If you have literally any other emulation handheld the RG Nano feels like some obscure torture method by comparison. I can confidently say, if the RG Nano is the only emu handheld you can get then maybe it's time for a new hobby. Pick up hiking, rollerblading, skateboarding, boardgames or tabletops.
