It's been a crazy few days for GoRetroid. They revealed the new Pocket 6 and the Pocket G2, received an overwhelming amount of backlash for the Pocket 6 design choice, and now, as of today, have announced a redesign.
They work fast, and I fully respect them for reacting so quickly and professionally on this. They're listening to the community, and that's more than can be said about many of their competitors.
It now seems like GoRetroid is offering the customer the choice of DPAD location on the upcoming redesign, alongside the removal of the M1/M2 buttons from the face and has relocated them to the back of the grips.
The screen will stay the same size, and the speaker grills will be located under the thumbsticks, alongside a couple of buttons to likely get you into menus and Android settings.
This allows them to place two buttons on the back to keep the same number of buttons which would have been there had they kept the M1/M2 buttons on the front. This was one of the main areas of concern for their audience.
This now means gamers can choose the button layout of their preference, and those who want fewer buttons on the face are also hopefully happy. It will be interesting to see which layout is most popular.
There's also no denying that this new redesign makes this look incredibly similar to the Odin 3. And that's also many people's concerns, the fact that this doesn't look unique in any way and looks like a standard Android handheld.
AYN and AYANEO seem to be innovating in the space with locked triggers, and more modern tech on devices that are already out, so I am personally a little disappointed to see that GoRetroid have added nothing new to this industry this time around.
GoRetroid's X post shared a text image, which informed the community of the updates alongside an upcoming announcement about the pre-order dates, which are likely going to be in the next couple of weeks if I had to guess.
Hopefully, the performance and UX will keep us all happy once this is released in early 2026, and I look forward to comparing this to others in the space.
