Retroid Pocket Flip Review – Awesome Android 11 clamshell retro gaming handheld!

In our Retroid Pocket Flip review we compare it with the previous model which shares the same processor and find out if the clamshell design, hall sensor sliders and analogue triggers are worth the upgrade?

Retroid Pocket Flip Review Video

Unboxing the Retroid Pocket Flip

First a very brief unboxing to start our Retroid Pocket Flip review. There’s a card which shows the controls and tech specs which is a bit pointless, but it’s there nonetheless. 

Next we have the Retroid Pocket Flip retro gaming handheld itself which we will show in more detail shortly. As a note, you do not get a micro SD card with the Pocket Flip so you will need to supply one yourself.

Underneath is a USB Type-C charge cable. And that’s it, I said it was a brief unboxing!

Retroid Pocket Flip Overview

We continue the Retroid Pocket Flip review with an overlook of the classic gaming handheld. The Retroid Pocket Flip measures around 5.4 x 3.2 x 0.9 inches (13.9 x 8.2 x 2.5 cm) when closed, and weighs about 270g. It’s very portable and easily fits in your pockets.

It’s available in five colours; Black, 16Bit US, Indigo, Sport Red and Watermelon.

The clamshell design opens up to reveal the 4.7” touchscreen with a 750×1334 resolution. It is the same found on the Pocket 3 & 3+ model. 

On the lower half there is a classic D-Pad and to the right four gaming buttons. Below are hall effect sliders that are clickable. And just below are the start and select buttons. It’s a bit plain in the middle area, some kind of design or raised surface would have made it look a bit nicer.

On the bottom there is the power button and headphone port.

On the left side is a micro sd card slot. And on the right are the volume buttons.

The top of the case has the left and right analogue trigger and shoulder buttons, with two additional M1 and M2 buttons which can be configured in the settings.

There is a USB Type-C charge port and a Micro HDMI port for output to your TV or monitor at 720P resolution.

Overall the Retroid Pocket Flip retro games console is comfortable to play on. All the front facing controls are within easy reach of each other, I did find that the shoulder buttons were slightly obstructed by the top half of the case and you find yourself rubbing the back of it while playing. The two macro buttons do require adjusting your hand to comfortably press. I rarely used these so it was not a major issue for me.

Retroid Pocket Flip Technical Specifications

We continue our Retroid Pocket Flip review with a look at the technical specifications. If they look familiar it is because they are essentially the same as the Retroid Pocket 3 Plus.

CPU	Unisoc Tiger T618 octa-core processor 2x A75 @2.0GHz & 6x [email protected]
GPU	Mali G52 MC2 @850MHz
RAM	4GB LPDDR4X @1866Mhz
STORAGE	128GB eMMC
COOLING	Active
SCREEN	4.7″ 750×1334 touch screen @ 450nits
WIFI	2.4G/5G 802.11 b/g/n/ac
BLUETOOTH	5.0
OS	Android 11
BATTERY	5000mAh
BATTERY LIFE	Up to 8 hours depending on usage. In our tests we got just over 5 hours running 3DMark benchmark on a loop.

OS & Menus overview

The Retroid Pocket Flip portable game console runs on Android 11 operating system and when first booted up you are presented with a welcome guide that goes through the initial setting up. Here you can choose which emulators and software you wish to install.

You can also choose to use the standard Android or Retroids own Launcher which is set up mainly for emulation. You do need to set it up from scratch and it is relatively painless, but takes it a bit of time. You essentially go through each system, add a ROM folder and it will scan it and add the recognised games for easy access. The process is not covered in this Retroid Pocket Flip review but we will have a guide on how to do this.

By swiping from right to left on the right side of the screen you can open the overlay software which gives you quick access to commonly used functions, system information, the built in screen mapping software and more. It is a very useful feature, especially the mapping software which lets you use the controller on Android games that do not support them.

Google Play Store is fully supported so you can download and update any games and apps you wish to. This is a great example of how an Android mobile gaming console should work. A nice setup process, useful launcher and overlay software and no jumping through hoops to get Play Store installed. Top marks here!

System Benchmarks

As part of our Retroid Pocket Flip review we ran a couple of system benchmarks. We can use the results to see the Pocket Flip performance as well as compare it to other Android based retro emulator devices

Geekbench

Geekbench runs a series of CPU based tests on the device. We can see that the Pocket Flip scores 382 and 1396 on the single and multi-core benchmarks. It’s pretty much identical to the Pocket 3+ and Anbernic RG505 which we expected to see as they have the same processors.. 

3DMark

3DMark tests the CPU and GPU working together for their best performance. We get a score of 2215 which again is similar to the Pocket 3+ and Anbernic RG505. 

Overall there are no differences between the three handhelds in terms of benchmark performance which is good to see.

Android Apps

As part of our Retroid Pocket Flip review we will be taking a brief look at some Android games and apps.

Call of Duty with on screen mapping

We are checking out Call of Duty Mobile which I have quickly mapped the controller to the on screen buttons. The on screen mapping lets you play games with the controller even if the game does not support it.

It takes a few moments to map the buttons to the screen icons. Depending on the game It may take a little extra tweaking, especially the joystick sensitivity but otherwise it works very well and definitely gives you the upper hand in games.

Forza Horizon 5 Xbox Cloud Gaming

Next we are briefly trying the Xbox Cloud Gaming. Providing you have a decent WiFi signal and internet speed you will have no issues at all with streaming games on the Retroid Pocket Flip. We did not see any stuttering or reduction in quality, including busy scenes. It works great!

Emulator Performance

We continue our Retroid Pocket Flip review with the emulators performance. We are next trying a whole bunch of emulators and games which were suggested by our followers on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Thanks to everyone that suggested a game, we could not use them all otherwise the video would be very long!

All of your 8 and 16 bit consoles and computers will have no issues on the Retroid Pocket Flip. So you can enjoy SNES, Mega Drive, PC Engine, Amstrad, Spectrum and many more classic consoles often with upscaled graphics for better visuals. We won’t spend too much time on them as we have plenty of newer systems to cover.

Arcade

We do not often get many arcade game requests so I wanted to check out a couple of suggested ones. With Arcade games I find you often have to spend a little time to make sure you are running the correct emulator with the ROM set you have. Some are for MAME 2003 while some are for MAME 2010 as an example. With RetroArch you can download a few different MAME and Arcade Cores and it should put them with the correct Core when you import the games.

Saturn

The SEGA Saturn does not get much love, but personally I find it to have some great games that are often overlooked. Ignore the text flickering on SEGA Rally, it might be an issue with the emulator as usually it works great. All the games I tried worked just fine.

Dreamcast

There are a couple of Dreamcast emulators you can try on the Retroid Pocket Flip. I played a couple of games on each and did not see any issues with performance as this processor can run them just fine.

PlayStation 1

Again there are a few emulators in RetroArch and native such as DuckStation that you can use. PlayStation runs great on this handheld and I did not have any problems with performance. I recommend DuckStation as you get excellent results from it including graphics improvements.

PlayStation 2

Now we get into the will games work or not area. PlayStation 2 emulation is relatively early on Android but with AetherSX2 we do see a few games working great. XIII and Shinobi were suggested and they do play very well.

Other games such as OutRun Coast to Coast are sadly not playable at default settings. You can squeeze a bit more performance out of it by reducing the rendering resolution for example.

Dolphin emulator

The Dolphin emulators have great compatibility but the Retroid Pocket Flip and similar handhelds do struggle with performance. Our go to game Burnout 2 works great and runs at mostly 60 frames per second. However you will find many games that are running at slower speeds, with many being unplayable.

PlayStation Portable

Our go to game God of War runs at mostly 60 FPS with very rare frame drops but nothing that spoils the gameplay.

We were suggested to try Killzone and could not get this running at a decent frame rate. Not sure off hand if it is an emulator compatibility issue or a performance issue.

Citra Emulator

The Citra emulator has seen some decent performance improvements over time and I noticed less stuttering when shader caching on Sonic Generations.

It will however still have some performance issues when shader caching the first time, but subsequent playthroughs will be far smoother. Not all games will work great but there are a fair few that will.

PlayStation Vita

PlayStation Vita emulation with Vita3K is relatively early in terms of development but we were able to get some games running. The excellent TxK is very playable as were a few other games.

There were also a few games not quite there in terms of performance such as Street Fighter vs Tekken. 

Skyline emulator

Another emulator fairly early in development is Skyline. I tried a bunch of games and many of them were not working, simply going back to the menu or force closing back to the launcher.

However I did get Sonic Mania running and it runs very well! Don’t get too excited though, it is a fairly basic game so don’t expect many games to run like this 🙂

Final Thoughts

We will now summarise our Retroid Pocket Flip review with our thoughts on the portable retro gaming console. The Retroid Pocket Flip is a very good gaming handheld in general. Its main use is for emulation and this is about as good as you are going to get in this price range right now. It can emulate up to the PlayStation 1 and Dreamcast era with no issues at all. And as we go into more recent generations we find  good support for the handheld consoles. The Vita3K and Skyline emulators are relatively early in development and some games are playable which is impressive but don’t expect performance to be much better on these going forward.

The Retroid Pocket Flip does offer more than emulation. You can also play a wide variety of native Android games and use all the apps from the Google Play Store. It’s great for watching videos either locally or streaming from YouTube, web browsing and of course gaming with a controller!

The choice of Android or Retroid Launcher is a nice touch. You can set up your game collection to have easy access from a decent game browser. It does take a bit of time to set up, but it is just as long as doing RetroArch or each emulator individually if you wanted to.

We also like the overlay software which gives you quick access to common functions such as screen mapping input,  streaming, recording and screenshots. It is done well and is very useful.

The controls are something that I have some mixed feelings on. It is comfortable to play on but I did find the shoulder buttons were a little obstructed by the top half of the case. It’s not a major issue, just something you would need to get used to, a traditional handheld would not have any obstruction. 

That was really my only complaint with the Retroid Pocket Flip retro emulator device. So the real decision comes down to if you want a traditional handheld such as the Retroid Pocket 3+,  or a clamshell design with the Retroid Pocket Flip? Let us know in the comments which one you would pick and why! That wraps up our Retroid Pocket Flip review!

You can learn more about and buy the Retroid Pocket Flip here. Find our range of retro gaming handhelds here.

Thanks for reading our Retroid Pocket Flip review, let us know in the comments if you have any questions.