My Analogue Pocket came today. Thoughts:
The screen looks great. Buttons feel alright, though as others have noted, using the L and R triggers with a cartridge inserted is a miserable experience. I can see getting finger pain pretty quickly while using L and R with actual cartridges. Without a cartridge, it's comfortable - once you get everything setup to play roms (which is pretty easy, there's a program out there that sets pretty much everything up for you, you just have to add roms. Oddly, the system shipped with 1.0 firmware, which required me to update to 1.1 to have it be able to run roms), it's a comfortable handheld. It's heavier than I thought it'd be - not in a bad way, it feels good. I do wish the start and select buttons were bigger, though they're not mushy and work well, like all the other buttons.
Playing on a cartridge is exactly like playing on actual Nintendo hardware - I've been soft resetting to try to get a shiny Bulbasaur in Leaf Green, and it works just like on GBA, no boot up screen or anything when you press start+select+A+B. On the newest firmware, when you select Play Cartridge on the main OS, it takes you to like a summary screen, which tells you what cartridge you're playing, which is neat, I suppose, but I wish I could select Play Cartridge and have it boot right into the game. There may be a way to set it to do so, I just haven't messed with that yet.
Emulation using the community developed cores seem pretty good, though I haven't gotten PC Engine CD to work yet, though that's a new thing and I haven't delved too deep into it yet. I hope they get some quality of life features the regular OS has into the jailbreak stuff - I'd like to be able to cycle Gameboy palettes in game, for example. Still, being able to play Super Gameboy games using the jailbreak stuff is great - Donkey Kong looks and runs great this way.
It came 75% charged, and after maybe an hour of messing around with it on 75% brightness, it dropped to 60%, though I was running OS updates and swapping quickly between emulated systems and whatnot, so who knows how accurate all that is to what actually sitting down and playing a game for a while affects the battery.
Overall: so far, I like it, and don't feel disappointed in my purchase (shipping was too expensive, and I'm in the continental US ffs, so I apparently had the cheapest option). The clear orange is nice, I'm glad I went with it.
