// THE VERGE — GAMING
The Pocket Advance nearly perfects my favorite Nintendo handheld
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
It’s a faithful Game Boy Advance clone, but the Pocket Advance runs Android, so you can play more than just GBA games.
It’s a faithful Game Boy Advance clone, but the Pocket Advance runs Android, so you can play more than just GBA games.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Although I count the original Game Boy as one of my first tech obsessions, I still consider Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance to be my favorite console of all time thanks to its more comfortable horizontal design (for my big hands) and its expansive catalog of excellent 32-bit and 16-bit games. Ayaneo isn’t the first company to attempt to modernize the GBA, but its Konkr Pocket Advance does it best. The handheld strikes a near perfect balance between authentically re-creating the GBA’s design while updating its hardware with new controls, a much better screen, and the flexibility of Android at a price that feels like a bargain.
As much as I still adore the GBA, I’ve eagerly embraced upgrades to the aging console over the years. First it was the clamshell GBA SP that finally delivered a frontlit screen I could actually see without a lamp over my shoulder, and later it was aftermarket upgrades like a backlit LCD display and a rechargeable battery that vastly improved Nintendo’s original hardware. Two years ago, I eagerly purchased Anbernic’s GBA-inspired RG34XX, but all of those have now been replaced by the Konkr Pocket Advance.
It’s my first handheld from Ayaneo, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find the hardware feels on par with Nintendo’s. The Pocket Advance is an all-plastic affair but with a satisfying heft thanks to extra internal hardware including a cooling fan for its MediaTek Helio G90T processor and a 4,000mAh battery. I opted for the cheaper $109 version with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage, which is expandable with a microSD card, but for $129, you can get 4GB of RAM with 64GB of storage built-in.