The New $50 Budget King // R35S Review

Hey guys Taki here. A new device arrived on my doorstep the other day, and I have many questions. I have no idea where it came from, who made it, who thought it was a good idea to clone a PowKiddy device, or why it is somehow better than the thing it cloned, but I do know one thing: This is the best bang for your buck budget handheld that currently exists by a large margin. This is the new R35S, and it is positioned to be a sleeper hit. There’s not much in the way of an unboxing experience with

this. Inside the box, we have an instructional manual, a charging cable, and the device itself. We are going to put this aside for now just to see if there is anything useful in the manual. This is kind of funny. This paper says that this device is the RGB R35S. RGB is the model name of the device that this cloned, but I’ve never seen this marketed as anything other than R35S. The back is also a little strange. It says that this is a Cortex A7 running at 1.5GHz, which would make sense for the pr

ice that this is going for. Thankfully, this is wrong and our processor is significantly better. We will go over that in just a moment, but let’s first go over the price. This thing is super difficult to get ahold of where I live, so I don’t know how much it costs directly from the mystery company that is manufacturing it, but it is up for sale from several 3rd party companies, and the biggest one that I found has this for sale for $49.99 without any coupons applied. That is a ridiculous price t

o charge for this hardware, given that other companies sell the same hardware for $30-$40 more. I want to put this in perspective, so I grabbed a few devices that are near this price point. From low to high, we have the R35S at $50, the RG35xx at $57.99 from Abernic, and the Miyoo Mini, which starts at around $60, but it’s never in stock. We could exclude it from this list for that reason and just replace it with the Mini Plus which goes for around $65. Now, this doesn't really paint the whole p

icture because these devices are not comparable in terms of performance. In fact, the processor in the Miyoo devices is the weakest of the bunch with no GPU at all. The 35XX is close behind with about the same CPU performance, but it does have a low-end GPU that allows it to do things that the Miyoo devices cannot do. If we put the devices in terms of performance and what they can do, the two Miyoo devices would be on the bottom with an A7 CPU and no GPU. The 35XX would be in the middle with an

A9 CPU and a low-end GPU. The R35S would be on the top with an A35 CPU and a much better GPU that is capable of doing a lot of things that these other devices cannot do. Now, let’s go over the specs. The R35S comes with the immortal RK3326 SoC with a Mali G31 GPU. We have 1GB of LPDDR4 RAM, 16GB of storage for the OS, and 64GB of storage for ROMs spread across two SD card slots. Our display is a 3.5” 480p panel, and we have a 3500 mAh battery, despite the labels listing it as 3200. Our operating

system is ArkOS, but we do have another option that I’ll talk about in just a moment. In this first section, I want to do an overview of the device. Starting with the front, we have the 3.5” screen. I don’t think this one will be too different from the others in the bunch, but we will look at them all later in the video. It’s a pretty good panel. Underneath the screen, we have two analog sticks and admittedly, the right stick is kind of pointless on this hardware. The left well is a bit more us

eful, but that comes down to the kinds of games that you are playing. Because of that, prioritizing these sticks on the top doesn’t make a lot of sense with the processor that we have. But whatever, that’s what we have. In the middle, we have a function button with start and select. The function button is useless right now because it cannot be mapped in any of the software that this comes with. It would have been useful if it worked. Start and select is used for most of the hotkey options on the

stock OS. Underneath those, you have a mono speaker. It’s unfortunate, but this is kind of standard on all of the devices that this thing competes with. Thankfully, our input buttons are decently sized. We will talk more about them in just a moment. On the right side, we have an SD card slot for the operating system and a set of volume buttons. On the left side, we have a second SD card for ROMs, as well as a power and reset button. This device supports sleep mode. There is nothing on the top o

f the device, but we do have some important things on the bottom. For some reason, we have cut out holes for stereo speakers. We have two USB ports down here. One is used for charging and the other can be used with a Wi-Fi dongle. Aside from that, we also have a headphone jack. Finally, we have four shoulder buttons on the back. Some of these are used for hotkeys in the default system. The only other change in this shell is the bottom half. Obviously, we have to talk about the elephant in the ro

om which is the RGB20s. This is a device that I have not reviewed on the channel. I had it when it came out, but I didn’t review it because I thought it was kind of stupid. Maybe that doesn’t matter because it ended up being very popular with people buying it from TikTok videos. Even though this device is clearly an obvious clone of the RGB20S, there are some things that this device does better than this one. There are also some things that this one does better than the clone. And I want to go o

ver them now because it also ties into the build quality of the device. The first thing you'll see is that our shell type is different, and this device never came in this style. This one does come in all of the PowKiddy colors, which I'm assuming was on purpose. Even without that, you'll see that they made very minor changes to keep this from being a perfect clone. The speaker's position moved and they also inverted the three buttons to kill the smiley face thing that this had going on. three bu

ttons to kill the kind of stupid smiley face thing that was going on here. Those aren’t meaningful changes, and if you were already opting to clone this device and remake a new mold, you would be far better off adjusting the controls. Now, one of the odd things is that the shell casing on the clone actually feels a lot better than the original, which is not very surprising. The company that makes these RGB devices uses the same type of plastic on all of their devices and it feels kind of cheap,

especially when you consider that this one is way more money than the clone. It doesn't really make sense that they could get this to feel better than the original. The buttons also look like they are the same, but the ones in the RGB20s feel better than the clone. And that comes down to the conductive rubber that they use. If I press a button on the R35S, you’ll see that the buttons around it also move. The conductive rubber is harder to press down and the same can be said for the DPAD. On the

20S, this isn’t possible, and the buttons are way software to press on the clone. All of the buttons feel significantly better to use. So just from that standpoint, I think they did not do a good job of cloning the original. But there's something else that's important to talk about. The stiff rubber makes it possible to press more than one directional button at a time when you press down hard enough. As you can see, each button works if I press them one by one, but if I press the right direction

a bit harder, it will also press down. When I first started using this device, this would happen all the time because I wasn’t used to the amount of force that this requires. I’m used to it now, so this doesn’t happen that often. Ideally, you wouldn't want anything like this to happen at all, and it doesn’t happen on the RGB20S. The good news is that they can fix this by adjusting the formula they use to make their conductive rubber. If I use the conductive rubber from RGB20S on the R35S, this

won’t happen. The shoulder buttons are also different. The RGB20S uses micro switches that are less loud and feel more comfortable to use. The buttons on the R35S have a hard click to them and they are much louder. There are some other interesting similarities, but we need to wait until we do a teardown. Even though the buttons are stiffer than I would like and the pad has the issue that I just pointed out, they work very well in fighting games for some reason. This doesn’t make a lot of sense t

o me, but I was having an easier time getting off moves in Street Fighter than I thought I would. I even think this performs better than the softer buttons on the 20S. In terms of operating system support. This device supports every OS that runs on the RGB20S, which surprisingly is not a whole lot given how popular the device was on TikTok. It never really got picked up by the bigger distros. It comes with a build of ArkOS, but it’s important to note that this is not officially supported by ArkO

S. The other option that you have is Unofficial OS and this one's also not ideal for several reasons. Depending on the types of systems that you want to play, you're going to get way better performance on ArkOS. If you don’t care about Dreamcast, N64, or PSP, you can use Unofficial OS. No matter which you choose, you will need to make some changes out of the box to get the best performance for higher-end systems. There is a lot of room for customization on the stock OS. This is the theme that I'

m working with right now, and I'm using the card that came with my device. If we go into one of these sections, you'll see that they have added box art for the ROMs that they've included. It's not like this for every system, but you should find box art for some of what this includes, and you can always get more with a Wi-Fi dongle or from a PC. The system itself is pretty easy to use, especially if you have experience with any of these devices. You can pretty much get whatever you want done, and

as long as you set your expectations right, then you're going to be able to have a good time. I want to transition now over into some emulation performance tests. I’ve already filmed this processor more times than I ever wanted to, and there is not a whole lot that has changed since the last time I reviewed a device that used it. There are some changes or improvements, but those are on the higher end of what this chip can do. This device came with a boatload of games, so chances are pretty high

that you’ll find something that you want to play in the collection. Because we have a 4:3 screen, systems that were played on a TV will look the best on this device. It’s important to point out that this device can emulate more systems than you’ll see by default with the included card. They did not add ROMs for a lot of the lower-end consoles. I want to spend more time on heavier systems, but I did want to include at least one game from every system that is included out of the box. When it come

s to SNES, this chip doesn’t have enough power to play heavier titles like Super Mario World 2 with the latest SNES9x core. In this underground portion, my FPS tanked. Thankfully, it’s very easy to change the default core for each system, and all I needed to do was change SNES9x to the 2010 core for this game to run without issues in this location. After doing that, the system runs without a hitch. When it comes to the Game Boy systems, the OS will stretch the screen by default for all of them.

Usually, I will only stretch the screen like this if the panel is smaller like the Miyoo Mini, but this one isn’t so I’m going to go into the scaling options and change it to core provided so we have the native aspect ratio for this system. It’s up to personal preference, but I like the way this looks more. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but this chip does a great job of emulating GBA games. The black bars aren’t that bad, so this could be a good option for the price. Now we are finally at the

point where we can showcase some of the stuff that this thing can do that the other more expensive handhelds cannot. Our first system for this section is PS1, and you might be wondering why this is even here because this system runs on all the handhelds from the intro. That’s true, but we are running this at double the native resolution, which requires a lot more power. To my knowledge, the RG35XX is the only other one from the group that can do this well, but I don’t know if it can do it for e

very game. It’s no problem on this one. Dreamcast is our next system, and we don’t have an FPS counter for this. I am going to let the footage play out so you can judge how the system performs for yourself. You won’t be able to play every Dreamcast game on this, but some of the bigger ones work with a few hiccups here and there. Nintendo DS is our next system, and it’s another one that runs well on this device with the Drastic emulator. For these games, I am using the high-resolution 3D option,

which works well on most games. It doesn’t work that well in Pokemon Diamond, but we can fix that by just dropping back to native resolution. At native, most DS games should run on this platform, but I still prefer to use a DS or a 3DS for these kinds of games. PSP is a bit of a mixed bag on this device. At native resolution without frameskip, a lot of games are going to be out of reach, so you will be far better off with a real PSP instead of this device if you have your heart set on PSP games.

This won’t work in every situation, but you can try to enable auto frame skip for any game that is almost running at full speed to bridge the gap. Depending on the game, this frameskip might not be that noticeable, but I’m not a fan. Anyway, here’s a collection of titles. Our final system is Nintendo 64, and this is another one that does not have a frame counter. Because of that, you’ll have to listen to the audio to judge the performance. For $50, it’s not that bad. Before we jump into the tea

rdown, I want to talk about the differences in panel quality between the collection of handhelds that I used for this video. Based on what I am seeing in person, I would say that the Miyoo Mini Plus has the worst screen out of the bunch. The RGB20S has the best and brightest screen in the lineup, with the RG35XX and R35S close behind. In my opinion, the 35S screen is just a bit better than the 35XX panel, while also being a bit brighter overall. When we order them from best to worst, this is wha

t we get. The gap between the first three isn’t that significant, but there is a huge gap between all of them and the Mini Plus. That screen looks very bad and washed out in comparison. Now it’s time for the big teardown, and I have the original device and the clone for this. With both of them opened, the first interesting thing that I saw is that this PCB is version 11, which doesn’t instill a whole lot of confidence in the team that was doing it unless they meant 1.1. The next thing that you’l

l notice is that a lot of things are in the same position on both boards. If we look over here in the corner, all of these are in the same position and the traces on the board are also in the same position. There are very minor changes between the two. As I mentioned, the back buttons on the PowKiddy device are better, even though the component looks the same. Interestingly, the R35S completely removes the pads that would hold the Wi-Fi chip. I checked on the other side of this PCB, and it isn’t

there. That’s kind of a bummer. But yeah, a ton of stuff is in the same spot on both boards. It reminds me of the old “copy your friend’s homework and change a few answers” thing. If I had to guess, someone handed over the RGB20S schematics to another company, and they made minor changes to get it out the door. That, or the original company reused it for another customer. Anyway, we can do some interesting shell mixing given that the shells are nearly identical. While we are here, another very

strange thing about this device is the sticker on the back. For whatever reason, they tried to copy the style that Anbernic uses. The font is a little different, but everything else is in the same spot. This also extends to the box, which also follows Anbernic’s style. Very strange. I feel like we covered a lot of ground in this video, but I want to end with my overall thoughts on this mystery clone device that came out of nowhere. I am a fan of devices that deliver a good value for what you pay

and this one does that in spades. It’s very rare for a handheld to come out at a price point like this with the features that it has, and I wish other companies wouldn’t be afraid to do the same. It’s a little strange that they decided to clone a device that has some obvious flaws, but they did. The safer bet would have been to just move the controls around instead of trying to look nearly identical to the TikTok king. Given that this is just shy of $50, I don’t want to nitpick, but I do think

that the factory that makes this should quickly produce a better pair of conductive rubber pads to knock this entire thing out of the park. The only other thing that I found while using this is that the adhesive on the bottom edge of the screen isn’t that strong on one of my units, but that is easy to fix during mass production. As for my recommendation, this thing is a no-brainer at $50. I don’t know how long that pricing will last, but it will make a lot of other devices irrelevant if they can

maintain that pricing going forward. Hopefully, they can do it. If you enjoyed this video and you want to see another, take a look at my video on the RG35XX. Happy gaming everyone, Taki out.