You may not have seen it, but a handheld was recently released on AliExpress and other online retailers with very prominent Lenovo branding on it. This in itself isn't anything new, as we are all familiar with Chinese companies infringing on trademarks in the handheld space; it's very common, and many come pre-loaded with ROMs, which is very illegal.
But what is new is the fact that this specific Lenovo handheld had premium packaging, was heavily promoted as Lenovo's and Lenovo themselves even featured the device on their Chinese website, making me incredibly curious as to who exactly owns this retro handheld.
At first, I was confident it was fake, so I ordered it on AliExpress for about £65, expecting a literal brick to arrive or something similar, but broken. To my suprise the actual device turned up, with the Lenovo packaging, Lenovo manuals, and it even booted up with the official Lenovo branding. "Well, shiver my timbers, this thing exists". Exists it does, but it still doesn't explain if this is an illegal product plastered with Lenovo's branding rammed with copyrighted games (yes this has thousands of Nintendo games preloaded), or if it is indeed an official product from Lenovo.
Well, to my surprise. It is actually an official Lenovo product. Once it arrived, I emailed as many Lenovo employees associated with PR or product licensing as possible. One person who was a part of the Global Corporate Media team responded and then forwarded me to the team in China, who are in charge of Product and Licensing. After many back and forths and a new contact, I was greeted with a response from Pedro.
Pedro stated: "The G02 device is produced through a regional brand licensing agreement meant for the China market only and is not part of Lenovo’s official global product portfolio. As such, products developed through these agreements may differ from Lenovo products sold through authorised channels. Thank you for your concern about Lenovo and for flagging this".
To me, this is confirmation that they know what this device is, and have permitted the company building this to white-label this as Lenovo's. Which in my mind is completely absurd as its a incredibly low quality product that damages Lenovo's brand through simply being terrible and for the fact that it has thousands upon thousands of copyrighted games preinstalled on the device, most of them being Nintendo's.
It's obvious Lenovo hasn't manufactured this. It's obvious that it's a quick cash grab, and it's obvious that we all, as gamers, now think less of Lenovo for going down this route of producing low-quality e-waste. All to make a quick buck. But what's even more desperate is that they are happily engaging in illegal activity to do just that.
The handheld emulation scene is already confusing for newcomers, shady at points due to China's laws and the fact that companies like Lenovo try to pull fast ones like this. It's the equivalent of SouljaBoy trying to illegally sell Retroid's products as his own.
This type of whitelabelling might be the norm in Chinese markets, but Lenovo obviously know that this will leak into other international markets and obviusly know that preloading games from other video games companies is illegal. So, although Lenovo meant" for this to sell in China only, it seems they don't mind it finding its way elsewhere.
Maybe I'm sour because I thought better of Lenovo, or because I know that Lenovo has millions of dollars in the bank, making them very capable of developing a genuinly great, legal device in the space, yet their greed decided to go down the cheap and easy route, which benefits nobody and may in fact entice legal action from SEGA and Nintendo. Do better, Lenovo. This is not typical of a globally renowned tech brand with... checks notes... $5Billion in the bank.
I'll keep you all updated should I hear back from Lenovo, but I think they slipped up here. The best place to keep informed is by subscribing to our free newsletter.
