At just $150, the newly available Anbernic RG503 gaming handheld is certainly undercutting the likes of the Steam Deck and AyaNeo Next on price, but its specs – as reported by CNX Software – point more toward an emulation and streaming deck than a portable PC.
At its heart sits Rockchip’s RK3566 SoC (featured in boards such as the Station M2 and considered a step up from the chip found in the Nintendo Switch and Raspberry Pi 3B+), which contains four Arm Cortex A55 cores ticking over at 1.8GHz. These are backed by just 1GB of LPDDR4 RAM and a Mali G-52 EE GPU. Storage comes in the form of two Micro SD slots, and the screen is a 4.95in OLED with a 960×544 resolution but isn’t a touchscreen.
To interact, you’ll need to use the D-pad, pair of analog sticks (in a PlayStation configuration at the lower edge of the chassis), four face buttons, and triggers. There’s wireless communication in the form of Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 4.2, and a 3,200 mAH battery apparently good for six hours of use. The video out port comes via a micro HDMI 2.0a socket, there’s a USB port for charging, and the whole thing weighs just 235g (8.3oz) in a package measuring 19 x 8.4 x 2.1 cm (7.4 x 3.3 x 0.8 in).
Now, with one eye on our lawyers, we should tell you that the device is available with a 64GB Micro SD card stuffed with games – 4,193 of them – which, judging by video reviews we’ve seen, appear to be of the copyrighted variety . Of course, we couldn’t possibly suggest buying one for that sort of thing, but the Linux OS the device runs (a fork of EmuELEC) sets it up nicely as a streaming unit, perhaps running Moonlight to stream Steam games from a gaming PC on the same network, and pretend it’s a Steam Deck, or Chiaki to stream your PlayStation 4 games. Alternatively, Kodi functionality is advertised, so you could use it as a media streamer, though that screen is likely to be as limiting as the small amount of RAM.
The Anbernic RG503 is available from Anberic’s store for $149.99, rising to $157.99 with that naughty SD card. It’s also being sold on AliExpress and Banggood.