Brandon and I were just talking about ANBERNIC's aggressive release schedule and their penchant for copying and improving on other handhelds' designs in our latest podcast (you know I'm talking about the Miyoo Flip and the RG34XXSP). The RG34XXSP has barely been on our desks for a week at the point of writing this article, and here we are with another release - a pro version of the RG35XX series.
We're no strangers to ANBERNIC handhelds here at Retro Dodo as you well know, and the RG35XX Pro kind of feels like the next iteration of the RG353V in many respects. Even knowing that this design sort of already exists in their back catalogue, however, I can't deny that it bears a strong resemblance to the BattleXP G350 in terms of button placement and design. Still, that's probably just a happy little accident, as Bob Ross might say, right?
It's hard to guess where ANBERNIC are going to go next at this rate, as they don't leave us much time to contemplate, what with new releases heading our way quicker than we have hot dinners. After the RG557 which I wrote about recently, we thought that they might continue down the horizontal handheld route for their next few releases, possibly competing with the Retroid Pocket Flip 2 in a clamshell (it's coming, we're sure of it), but it seems that they've chosen to soup-up our favorite ANBERNIC clamshell to date with increased power to allow it to play home consoles up to N64 and Dreamcast (fifth-gen), as well as handhelds up to NDS and PSP (seventh-gen).
So what is 'Pro' about this new device then? Well, as well as allowing for streaming off a PC and Net Play multiplayer, there are no specific stats that are publicly available from ANBERNIC as of yet, though they should be arriving in our inbox very soon. If I were to guess, I would say that it's likely they'll use the Allwinner H700 chipset which they've put inside the RG34XXSP, as they're just pumping out handhelds that are very similar to each other at this point. I also think that they'll upgrade to 2GB of RAM from the 1GB of RAM found in the standard RG35XXSP, which is currently on sale on the ANBERNIC website.
The main thing that's got us excited, however, is that crystal blue transparent shell at the back of the white and black variants of the RG35XX Pro in the featured image of this article and the star of the show on the YouTube video below. That takes us straight back to the golden age of the Game Boy Color right there, and we're very excited to get our hands on one of those to review very soon. Take a look at the announcement trailer below to see the handheld in action!
The Retroid Pocket Flip 2 (left) and ANBERNIC RG34XXSP (right)
