Retroid Pocket 4 Pro First Look, Is It The BEST Retro Handheld Hands On Review

The Retroid Pocket 4 Pro: A Gaming Handheld That Delivers Big Performance at an Affordable Price

We recently had the opportunity to test out the Retroid Pocket 4 Pro, a handheld gaming device that's packed with impressive features and performance. As soon as we powered it on, we knew we were in for a treat. The device is running God of War I for PS2, which is a notoriously demanding game that's known for its challenging gameplay and high frame rates. And yet, the Retroid Pocket 4 Pro was handling it with ease, delivering smooth and responsive performance that left us impressed.

One of the standout features of the Retroid Pocket 4 Pro is its ability to handle demanding games like God of War I with ease. While we know that this game is designed for high-end hardware, the device's capabilities were surprising. We're running at a solid 60 frames per second, which is impressive considering the device's relatively modest specs. And yet, despite the high frame rate, we didn't experience any significant lag or stuttering, even when playing at maximum difficulty levels.

Another feature that sets the Retroid Pocket 4 Pro apart from its competitors is its built-in cooling fan. We put the device through a series of stress tests to see how it would perform under load, and were pleased to find that it was able to handle even the most demanding tasks without any issues. The fan itself is a bit louder than we expected, but this is largely mitigated by the fact that you can turn down the volume on your games. We found that turning the volume down to around 50-60% made the fan noise almost imperceptible.

One of the things we enjoyed most about testing the Retroid Pocket 4 Pro was its intuitive interface and controls. The device features a range of physical buttons, including a D-pad with conductive pads underneath for precise control. We found that this allowed us to play games like platformers without missing a beat. Additionally, the device has Wi-Fi 6 connectivity, making it easy to stream our favorite games using services like Steam Link.

Streaming performance was also impressive, thanks in part to the device's powerful hardware and fast internet connection. We connected the Retroid Pocket 4 Pro to our main gaming PC via Ethernet, which allowed us to take full advantage of the device's streaming capabilities. When connected to Wi-Fi, however, we found that the stream quality dropped off slightly, although this was still acceptable.

In terms of battery life, the Retroid Pocket 4 Pro has proven itself to be a solid performer. We ran a series of tests, including one that lasted for several hours while playing games, and were pleased to find that the device was able to deliver good results. While we wouldn't say that it's as long-lasting as some other devices on the market, we found that it was still well within our expectations.

Overall, we're thoroughly impressed with the Retroid Pocket 4 Pro. At a price point of $199, it's an absolute steal for anyone looking for a reliable and powerful handheld gaming device. While there are certainly more powerful Android-based handhelds on the market, such as the Odin 2, they come at a significantly higher price point. The Retroid Pocket 4 Pro is an excellent option for gamers who want to play their favorite titles on-the-go without breaking the bank.

First Impressions: What We Think of the Retroid Pocket 4 Pro

We've been spending some time with the Retroid Pocket 4 Pro, and we're excited to share our first impressions. The device is a real showstopper, with its sleek design and impressive features. One of the things that really caught our eye was the Forum Factor, which gives the device a unique look and feel. We also appreciate the range of color options available for the device, including some really cool and limited edition designs.

Another feature that's worth mentioning is the D-pad on the front of the device. While it may seem like a small thing, we found that this added a whole new level of precision and control to our gameplay. The conductive pads underneath the D-pad were particularly impressive, allowing us to perform complex moves with ease. We're also glad that the developer has paid attention to the details, including the fact that the buttons on the front of the device are perfectly positioned for easy access.

While we've been enjoying the Retroid Pocket 4 Pro, there is one area where we think it could be improved: the fan profile. The device's cooling system is really effective, but sometimes the fan can get a bit loud when operating at high settings. We found that turning down the volume on our games made this issue less noticeable, and we were pleased to find that the device was still able to handle demanding tasks without any issues.

Overall, we're thoroughly enjoying the Retroid Pocket 4 Pro. It's a fantastic handheld gaming device that delivers impressive performance at an affordable price point. We can't wait to see what the future holds for this device, and we highly recommend it to anyone looking for a reliable and powerful way to play their favorite games on-the-go.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwith the pro model coming in with a $199 priz tag I think this is one of the best little retro streaming handhelds on the market right now hey what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again today we're going to be taking a look at the all new retroid pocket 4 Pro and this is one that I've been super excited about due to the new CPU they opted to use in this handheld and uh you know I've actually had it in my possession for a few days and this thing is putting out some absolutely amazing performance so they are offering a bunch of different color variants I went with the watermelon version that's kind of my favorite that they've come up with since the pocket flip and uh yeah I do think it still looks really good here on the pocket 4 Pro and keep in mind retroid is offering two different variants of the new pocket 4 they've got the regular pocket 4 with the dominity 900 CPU and what we're going to be taking a look at in this video is the 4 Pro with the dominity 1100 which is definitely going to put out better performance than the 900 if I can get my hands on the non-pro version I will will'll do kind of a comparison video but for now we've got this one and again this thing is a great performer okay so first things first love the form factor and they kept with the same form factor of the retroid pocket 3 and the 3 plus a very portable system with a 5,000 mamp hour battery we do have analog triggers around back here so you've got that linear press to it works out really well for racing games and up front they did opt to use Hall based analog sticks so we don't have to worry about drift or anything like that now one thing I was worried about when going into this was the d-pad I'm not a huge fan of d-pads that use Dome switches I personally love a conductive pad Unfortunately they went with Dome switches here but the roll on it does feel really nice has a little bit of give and we will be doing some testing in this video but the first thing I wanted to do was just give you an overall look at the unit itself now down here at the bottom we do have dual stereo speakers these can get quite loud but at 100% volume they do get a bit Tenny so I've been sticking around 80% and I don't even need it that loud it's just kind of when I was filming I had it up all the way when I was emulating some PSP noticed that it did get a bit kind of harsh on the ear at 100% but other than that down here we do get a 3.5 mm audio jack for plugging in some headphones micro SD card slot and USB type-c for charging the internal battery up top we've got our power button volume rocker and a micro HDMI output so we can plug this into a larger display and since this is utilizing a 16 by9 aspect ratio display when you plug this into a TV you're going to get a full screen experience out of it unfortunately there's no desktop mode to make it kind of a better experience but it does 1080p out and it looks really good now again we've got our d-pad here with Dome switches Hall based analog sticks and as you can see these are the smaller sticks like you'd find in the switch some people aren't into them but you know since they're Hall based we don't have to worry about any kind of stick drift and they're really accurate I'd say the main claim to fame for the new retroid pocket 4 Pro is the CPU they're using we've got the mediatech dimensity 1100 this is an 8 core S so 4 a78 cores at 2.6 GHz and 4 a55 cores at 2 GHz this is not a new chip by any means we've actually seen a couple other handhelds on the market with the dimensity 1100 but unfortunately those have been really hard to get your hands on and the pricing has kind of been all over the place with this the pro model is coming in at $199 and the lower end retroid pocket 4 with the dimensity 900 is 149 with the more powerful CPU we also get a more powerful GPU this is using the Mali g77 mc9 at 836 MHz we've got 8 GB of LP DDR 4X Ram 128 GB of ufs 3.1 storage build 10 plus we can add a Micro SD card it's got a 4.7 in 16x9 60 HZ display at 750 by 1334 and up to 500 nits of brightness Wi-Fi 6 Bluetooth 5.2 micro HDMI output USB type-c 5,000 mAh battery and this is running Android 13 with OTA updates directly from retroid the very first thing we're going to be taking a look at are some benchmarks and we're going to be facing this off against the retroid pocket 3 plus just to see if it would be worth the upgrade remember the pocket 3 plus had the uniso t618 CPU and with this one we did have to use geekbench 5 instead of geekbench 6 on the pocket 3 plus single core 383 multi 1442 and of course the pocket 4 Pro with the dimensity 11100 blew it out of the water single core 829 multi 3142 when it comes to 3D Mark we did have to run slingshot on the older t618 CPU and with that we scored a 2,247 and as you can see on the new pocket 4 Pro with that dimensity 1100 it's maxed out but I still wanted to give you an idea here using the wildlife extreme Benchmark we scored a 1,263 unfortunately this is one of those benchmarks that just won't run on the uniso t618 and finally we've got the n22 Benchmark on the pocket 3 plus we scored a 231,000 and if you take a look down the list at the individual scores you can see that it is absolutely decimating the uniso t68 18 in all of the tests so yeah we've got a significantly more powerful handheld here by quite a bit and the performance really does show that we will get into a lot of testing very shortly but I wanted to give you a quick overview of everything we have built in here with the operating system okay so I wanted to move in a bit closer so we could get a better look at everything and uh overall I mean this is a very smooth operating system running Android 13 got a pretty powerful chip here given that we've got a smaller handheld pulling down from the top we've got all of our quick actions Wi-Fi Bluetooth airplane mode alarm all that normal stuff but we've also got some stuff tailored specifically for this handheld like our performance menu here so we've got standard performance and high performance now in high performance this is automatically going to set our fan to sport but you can go to smart if you want to and I've done some thermal testing here and high performance mode with the fan on this thing will not thermal throttle we'll take a look at that in just a little bit this one right here Force landscape mode does come in really handy for a lot of different applications on Android glad that it's here obviously we can go to our battery saver if we want to but moving into the official Android settings we've actually got a dedicated section here also known as handheld settings from power saving we can actually clean the ram once this goes into standby and we can set a background process limit so basically on all of my Android devices I do three to for I'm just going to leave it at the standard limit here because I haven't run into any issues connect to TV you can have this in mirror mode or you can totally disable the screen on the handheld itself no Auto sleep and of course Force landscape you definitely want that when you're connected to a larger display USB status bar input controller style you can set this up so the face buttons are going to act like an Xbox retro is going to be more of a switch style personally I like having it set up like this we've also got an l 2 and R2 mode this does have analog triggers you can set this up as analog digital or both I just leave it on analog uh works pretty good here tested a lot of racing games virtual Mouse enabling this will allow us to use Mouse on screen with the uh built-in analog stick and I just set up a hotkey so I'm just using my shoulder buttons if I hold it for 3 seconds no matter where I am it's going to disable that for me automatically Google services and we've got our ADV Advance mode so you know going through this there's actually a lot of great stuff here tailored towards this little handheld and I think that retroid has done a really good job with their custom Android builds for their pocket devices I wanted to jump into a little bit of gameplay to give you a look at the extra settings we have here to help out with our games uh obviously playing Minecraft here it's going to run on this chip really well swiping over from the right hand side is going to bring up our menu from the top key adapter now this is really awesome for games like ginch pack and others that don't officially support controllers on Android basically we can set this up any way we' like and we can place these buttons anywhere on screen so for instance this is going to be my left analog stick this is going to be my right analog stick now Minecraft does officially support a controller so I really don't need to set this up but I wanted to give you a look here because there's still a lot of great Android games that don't support controllers and since we've got it built in here to the handheld itself it makes it really easy to kind of map those now one thing thing you will run into is kind of using the right analog stick as camera movement just double tap on that right analog stick that you placed on screen and from here virtual joystick mode directional skill mode adjust View mode now this is what I use for ginch and impact on my right analog stick uh you can set the sensitivity and you may need to adjust this to your liking but what they've done here with the built-in key mapper is really awesome I mean there's a lot of settings that we can use here just makes it really easy to set up these onscreen controls tapping speed up will clear those background processes which just going to release some Ram that's been cached we've got a record button here so we've got a built-in screen recorder we can go up to 1080p with it personally I don't like using the built-in recorder uh we've got HDMI here so it's pretty easy to plug into a larger display or even a capture device at the bottom we've got our onscreen FPS counter temperature CPU usage and memory I'm going to enable that floating FPS monitor now we've got a realtime FPS counter so we can see how well our games are running and you know for most of the Android games that I've tested it actually does 60fps really well some of the higher-end stuff you may need to drop the settings down just a little bit but it's definitely a really powerful little device and I love the form factor of this new pocket 4 now of course we've got an Android device with stock Android UI but we also have the retroid launcher built in now you could get by without even touching this if you wanted to this is definitely built for emulation this will allow us to import categorize and download box art for our games really easy to use and I'll show you real quick I've actually loaded up some games on an SD card got a 128 GB card as you can see my NES section is not populated yet so I'm going to go with the default SD card location we'll hit scan now it's going to populate the games that I have on that SD card and it's automatically going to download box box art now with this I did have a few boxes missing and it's due to the name Convention of the game I have I just took some random stuff and threw it on here but yeah this is really great for kind of organizing everything we can also set up our emulator parameters per system but now I think it's time to test out some gaming on this device because that's what it's all about we're going to start off here with some native Android gaming then we'll move over to some emulation and the first game we have here is Asphalt 9 it's another one of those games that does natively support controllers so I don't need to use any kind of mapping software I'm at high quality from the settings and as you can see it's running really well I really haven't run into any Android game that's not running at or really close to full speed on this device yet next we've got Call of Duty mobile High settings 60fps and to my surprise the built-in controls work natively with this game sometimes with these handhelds you do have to use a key mapper because uh with this game itself it only officially supports a few controllers but I guess de developers have kind of found a way around that and luckily here with the new retroid pocket 4 Pro we've got controller support so not an issue to play this one but of course with genin impact on Android we're still lacking official controller support and that's where the built-in mapper comes in really handy right now I've got this game at a low medium mix 60fps you can see we've got a pretty steady frame right here that frame counter is in the middle of the screen there and I'll tell you once you set up the key mapper with this game you will need to adjust the sensitivity to your liking uh for me the uh camera movement is definitely a bit fast but you can actually get in there and just turn it way down if you need to now I think it's time to move over to some emulation because that's one of the big reasons somebody's going to pick up a device like this and the first thing I wanted to test here was some Dreamcast and while we're here I figured we'd test out the d-pad so here we have the redream emulator I'm upscale to 1280 by 960 and I know we could go a bit higher with it but uh with the screen resolution it looks great like this d-pad itself isn't using in conductive pads using those Dome switches but the way they've set this up it's actually got a really nice role to it one of the better Dome switch d-pads on the market in my opinion that I've tested so far it's not as tight as some others that I've tested and I think they kind of found a nice little balance here with the way they have it set up actually been having a pretty good time playing fighting games with this and of course Dreamcast is going to run at full speed whether you want to use freed dream or even the flycast emulator moving over to some PSP using the pp sspp emulator 2x resolution bulking back in chains of Olympus running at a steady 60fps now I was sure we were going to be able to get some really great PSP emulation out of this device after all we've got that mediate Tech dimensity 1100 and and since this game is one of those that's harder to emulate on lower-end chip sets we can upscale the easier to run stuff on this device just fine there are some games will'll be able to go up to 5 and 7x on thing in this video is ether sx2 for some PS2 emul I'm at 2x resolution with Grand Turismo 4 open GL back in seeing 60 FPS across the board looking really good now one thing that kind of bugs me is the placement of the start and select on this a lot of these games do require you to hit select to change the view and getting down there while I'm holding the gas kind of doesn't work out sometimes but if you do find yourself struggling with something like this remember you can always remap that button now another one I wanted to test here was God of War 2 and with this I did have to take it down to 1x resolution still using that openg G back in and with all of these games for PS2 I don't have any of the hacks on you could still introduce a couple cycle skips if you wanted to and uh you know it's going to lower that FPS but you could get a smoother experience if you don't want this lower resolution but with the smaller screen I still think it looks pretty good here and we're running at 60 with God of War I for PS2 on this $199 handheld gaming device that's pretty awesome if you ask me another thing we have here with the retroid pocket 4 and the 4 Pro is Wi-Fi 6 so streaming your favorite games using something like steam link is going to work out amazingly I've got this connected to my main gaming PC pretty beefy system I've got it set up so it's only going to do 60 FPS soon as I booted this up all of the buttons worked I didn't have to do any kind of remapping or anything like that it just worked right out of the box and if you've got a good router then you're going to see some good performance out of Ste steam link or Moonlight one thing I always try to do with uh game streaming is make sure that the PC I'm streaming from has a wired connection so my main gaming PC is plugged in Ethernet right now we're just on Wi-Fi with this obviously but it does kind of alleviate you know having two wireless signals there having my PC on ethernet really helps out another thing I wanted to do with this device was just test the thermal performance now we do have that built-in cooling fan and with my test I have it in smart mode where at high performance I just ran for about 11 minutes here this is stressing out all eight cores to 100% I mean that's as far as we can take it right now the fan itself is a bit louder than I thought it would be given that it's working with such a small blower style it doesn't sound like a jet engine or anything like that but you can definitely hear it now jacking up your games volume to around 50 to 60% does kind of drown that out but in my 11-minute test in high performance mode with that fan set to Smart we didn't see any kind of major thermal throttling so you can play this all day with your favorite games and this is more of an extreme test because it's maxing out all eight cores at 100% while you're playing a game you're not going to be putting the kind of load on the system that we're seeing here and the maximum CPU temperature that I saw by the end of my run here was only 62° C so we're well under thermal throttle and when it comes to overall battery life it's actually looking pretty good now it's going to depend on what you're doing with the device for instance I ran a demo of GBA just using retro art screen at 100% brightness I Got 5 hours and 54 minutes of runtime out of this now with a stress test maxing out all eight cores to 100% 2 hours and 9 minutes so it's going to be all over the place depending on what you're doing but mixed use you're probably in the 4H hour range which really isn't too bad First Impressions here for the retroid pocket 4 Pro love the Forum Factor they do offer a bunch of different color options I kind of wish that we did have a conductive pad under this d-pad here you know with the Dome switches and the way they have it it does work I can pull off my special moves I can play my favorite Platformers without missing a hit we're also looking at some really decent battery life now one thing I'd love to see changed here is uh just the fan profile they have we've got the smart and Sport even in smart it can get a bit loud it's a little Annoying if you've got the volume down but like I mentioned I mean at about 50% volume playing a game it's not too noticeable it' just be nice to be able to take that down a bit more because we're definitely not hitting thermal throttle with that thing maxed out so yeah I've been really enjoying the retroid pocket 4 Pro and with a price tag of $199 it's kind of hard to beat this now there are more powerful Android based handhelds out there like the Odin 2 but you know that's coming in at around 332 for the base and they're really hard to get your hands on so this actually might be a great option for a lot of people out there I've personally been having a lot of fun with this thing and if you're interested in learning a little more maybe picking one up I'll leave some links in the description and I will have another video coming up so let me know what you want to see running on this device in the comments below but that's it for this one like always thanks for watchingwith the pro model coming in with a $199 priz tag I think this is one of the best little retro streaming handhelds on the market right now hey what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again today we're going to be taking a look at the all new retroid pocket 4 Pro and this is one that I've been super excited about due to the new CPU they opted to use in this handheld and uh you know I've actually had it in my possession for a few days and this thing is putting out some absolutely amazing performance so they are offering a bunch of different color variants I went with the watermelon version that's kind of my favorite that they've come up with since the pocket flip and uh yeah I do think it still looks really good here on the pocket 4 Pro and keep in mind retroid is offering two different variants of the new pocket 4 they've got the regular pocket 4 with the dominity 900 CPU and what we're going to be taking a look at in this video is the 4 Pro with the dominity 1100 which is definitely going to put out better performance than the 900 if I can get my hands on the non-pro version I will will'll do kind of a comparison video but for now we've got this one and again this thing is a great performer okay so first things first love the form factor and they kept with the same form factor of the retroid pocket 3 and the 3 plus a very portable system with a 5,000 mamp hour battery we do have analog triggers around back here so you've got that linear press to it works out really well for racing games and up front they did opt to use Hall based analog sticks so we don't have to worry about drift or anything like that now one thing I was worried about when going into this was the d-pad I'm not a huge fan of d-pads that use Dome switches I personally love a conductive pad Unfortunately they went with Dome switches here but the roll on it does feel really nice has a little bit of give and we will be doing some testing in this video but the first thing I wanted to do was just give you an overall look at the unit itself now down here at the bottom we do have dual stereo speakers these can get quite loud but at 100% volume they do get a bit Tenny so I've been sticking around 80% and I don't even need it that loud it's just kind of when I was filming I had it up all the way when I was emulating some PSP noticed that it did get a bit kind of harsh on the ear at 100% but other than that down here we do get a 3.5 mm audio jack for plugging in some headphones micro SD card slot and USB type-c for charging the internal battery up top we've got our power button volume rocker and a micro HDMI output so we can plug this into a larger display and since this is utilizing a 16 by9 aspect ratio display when you plug this into a TV you're going to get a full screen experience out of it unfortunately there's no desktop mode to make it kind of a better experience but it does 1080p out and it looks really good now again we've got our d-pad here with Dome switches Hall based analog sticks and as you can see these are the smaller sticks like you'd find in the switch some people aren't into them but you know since they're Hall based we don't have to worry about any kind of stick drift and they're really accurate I'd say the main claim to fame for the new retroid pocket 4 Pro is the CPU they're using we've got the mediatech dimensity 1100 this is an 8 core S so 4 a78 cores at 2.6 GHz and 4 a55 cores at 2 GHz this is not a new chip by any means we've actually seen a couple other handhelds on the market with the dimensity 1100 but unfortunately those have been really hard to get your hands on and the pricing has kind of been all over the place with this the pro model is coming in at $199 and the lower end retroid pocket 4 with the dimensity 900 is 149 with the more powerful CPU we also get a more powerful GPU this is using the Mali g77 mc9 at 836 MHz we've got 8 GB of LP DDR 4X Ram 128 GB of ufs 3.1 storage build 10 plus we can add a Micro SD card it's got a 4.7 in 16x9 60 HZ display at 750 by 1334 and up to 500 nits of brightness Wi-Fi 6 Bluetooth 5.2 micro HDMI output USB type-c 5,000 mAh battery and this is running Android 13 with OTA updates directly from retroid the very first thing we're going to be taking a look at are some benchmarks and we're going to be facing this off against the retroid pocket 3 plus just to see if it would be worth the upgrade remember the pocket 3 plus had the uniso t618 CPU and with this one we did have to use geekbench 5 instead of geekbench 6 on the pocket 3 plus single core 383 multi 1442 and of course the pocket 4 Pro with the dimensity 11100 blew it out of the water single core 829 multi 3142 when it comes to 3D Mark we did have to run slingshot on the older t618 CPU and with that we scored a 2,247 and as you can see on the new pocket 4 Pro with that dimensity 1100 it's maxed out but I still wanted to give you an idea here using the wildlife extreme Benchmark we scored a 1,263 unfortunately this is one of those benchmarks that just won't run on the uniso t618 and finally we've got the n22 Benchmark on the pocket 3 plus we scored a 231,000 and if you take a look down the list at the individual scores you can see that it is absolutely decimating the uniso t68 18 in all of the tests so yeah we've got a significantly more powerful handheld here by quite a bit and the performance really does show that we will get into a lot of testing very shortly but I wanted to give you a quick overview of everything we have built in here with the operating system okay so I wanted to move in a bit closer so we could get a better look at everything and uh overall I mean this is a very smooth operating system running Android 13 got a pretty powerful chip here given that we've got a smaller handheld pulling down from the top we've got all of our quick actions Wi-Fi Bluetooth airplane mode alarm all that normal stuff but we've also got some stuff tailored specifically for this handheld like our performance menu here so we've got standard performance and high performance now in high performance this is automatically going to set our fan to sport but you can go to smart if you want to and I've done some thermal testing here and high performance mode with the fan on this thing will not thermal throttle we'll take a look at that in just a little bit this one right here Force landscape mode does come in really handy for a lot of different applications on Android glad that it's here obviously we can go to our battery saver if we want to but moving into the official Android settings we've actually got a dedicated section here also known as handheld settings from power saving we can actually clean the ram once this goes into standby and we can set a background process limit so basically on all of my Android devices I do three to for I'm just going to leave it at the standard limit here because I haven't run into any issues connect to TV you can have this in mirror mode or you can totally disable the screen on the handheld itself no Auto sleep and of course Force landscape you definitely want that when you're connected to a larger display USB status bar input controller style you can set this up so the face buttons are going to act like an Xbox retro is going to be more of a switch style personally I like having it set up like this we've also got an l 2 and R2 mode this does have analog triggers you can set this up as analog digital or both I just leave it on analog uh works pretty good here tested a lot of racing games virtual Mouse enabling this will allow us to use Mouse on screen with the uh built-in analog stick and I just set up a hotkey so I'm just using my shoulder buttons if I hold it for 3 seconds no matter where I am it's going to disable that for me automatically Google services and we've got our ADV Advance mode so you know going through this there's actually a lot of great stuff here tailored towards this little handheld and I think that retroid has done a really good job with their custom Android builds for their pocket devices I wanted to jump into a little bit of gameplay to give you a look at the extra settings we have here to help out with our games uh obviously playing Minecraft here it's going to run on this chip really well swiping over from the right hand side is going to bring up our menu from the top key adapter now this is really awesome for games like ginch pack and others that don't officially support controllers on Android basically we can set this up any way we' like and we can place these buttons anywhere on screen so for instance this is going to be my left analog stick this is going to be my right analog stick now Minecraft does officially support a controller so I really don't need to set this up but I wanted to give you a look here because there's still a lot of great Android games that don't support controllers and since we've got it built in here to the handheld itself it makes it really easy to kind of map those now one thing thing you will run into is kind of using the right analog stick as camera movement just double tap on that right analog stick that you placed on screen and from here virtual joystick mode directional skill mode adjust View mode now this is what I use for ginch and impact on my right analog stick uh you can set the sensitivity and you may need to adjust this to your liking but what they've done here with the built-in key mapper is really awesome I mean there's a lot of settings that we can use here just makes it really easy to set up these onscreen controls tapping speed up will clear those background processes which just going to release some Ram that's been cached we've got a record button here so we've got a built-in screen recorder we can go up to 1080p with it personally I don't like using the built-in recorder uh we've got HDMI here so it's pretty easy to plug into a larger display or even a capture device at the bottom we've got our onscreen FPS counter temperature CPU usage and memory I'm going to enable that floating FPS monitor now we've got a realtime FPS counter so we can see how well our games are running and you know for most of the Android games that I've tested it actually does 60fps really well some of the higher-end stuff you may need to drop the settings down just a little bit but it's definitely a really powerful little device and I love the form factor of this new pocket 4 now of course we've got an Android device with stock Android UI but we also have the retroid launcher built in now you could get by without even touching this if you wanted to this is definitely built for emulation this will allow us to import categorize and download box art for our games really easy to use and I'll show you real quick I've actually loaded up some games on an SD card got a 128 GB card as you can see my NES section is not populated yet so I'm going to go with the default SD card location we'll hit scan now it's going to populate the games that I have on that SD card and it's automatically going to download box box art now with this I did have a few boxes missing and it's due to the name Convention of the game I have I just took some random stuff and threw it on here but yeah this is really great for kind of organizing everything we can also set up our emulator parameters per system but now I think it's time to test out some gaming on this device because that's what it's all about we're going to start off here with some native Android gaming then we'll move over to some emulation and the first game we have here is Asphalt 9 it's another one of those games that does natively support controllers so I don't need to use any kind of mapping software I'm at high quality from the settings and as you can see it's running really well I really haven't run into any Android game that's not running at or really close to full speed on this device yet next we've got Call of Duty mobile High settings 60fps and to my surprise the built-in controls work natively with this game sometimes with these handhelds you do have to use a key mapper because uh with this game itself it only officially supports a few controllers but I guess de developers have kind of found a way around that and luckily here with the new retroid pocket 4 Pro we've got controller support so not an issue to play this one but of course with genin impact on Android we're still lacking official controller support and that's where the built-in mapper comes in really handy right now I've got this game at a low medium mix 60fps you can see we've got a pretty steady frame right here that frame counter is in the middle of the screen there and I'll tell you once you set up the key mapper with this game you will need to adjust the sensitivity to your liking uh for me the uh camera movement is definitely a bit fast but you can actually get in there and just turn it way down if you need to now I think it's time to move over to some emulation because that's one of the big reasons somebody's going to pick up a device like this and the first thing I wanted to test here was some Dreamcast and while we're here I figured we'd test out the d-pad so here we have the redream emulator I'm upscale to 1280 by 960 and I know we could go a bit higher with it but uh with the screen resolution it looks great like this d-pad itself isn't using in conductive pads using those Dome switches but the way they've set this up it's actually got a really nice role to it one of the better Dome switch d-pads on the market in my opinion that I've tested so far it's not as tight as some others that I've tested and I think they kind of found a nice little balance here with the way they have it set up actually been having a pretty good time playing fighting games with this and of course Dreamcast is going to run at full speed whether you want to use freed dream or even the flycast emulator moving over to some PSP using the pp sspp emulator 2x resolution bulking back in chains of Olympus running at a steady 60fps now I was sure we were going to be able to get some really great PSP emulation out of this device after all we've got that mediate Tech dimensity 1100 and and since this game is one of those that's harder to emulate on lower-end chip sets we can upscale the easier to run stuff on this device just fine there are some games will'll be able to go up to 5 and 7x on thing in this video is ether sx2 for some PS2 emul I'm at 2x resolution with Grand Turismo 4 open GL back in seeing 60 FPS across the board looking really good now one thing that kind of bugs me is the placement of the start and select on this a lot of these games do require you to hit select to change the view and getting down there while I'm holding the gas kind of doesn't work out sometimes but if you do find yourself struggling with something like this remember you can always remap that button now another one I wanted to test here was God of War 2 and with this I did have to take it down to 1x resolution still using that openg G back in and with all of these games for PS2 I don't have any of the hacks on you could still introduce a couple cycle skips if you wanted to and uh you know it's going to lower that FPS but you could get a smoother experience if you don't want this lower resolution but with the smaller screen I still think it looks pretty good here and we're running at 60 with God of War I for PS2 on this $199 handheld gaming device that's pretty awesome if you ask me another thing we have here with the retroid pocket 4 and the 4 Pro is Wi-Fi 6 so streaming your favorite games using something like steam link is going to work out amazingly I've got this connected to my main gaming PC pretty beefy system I've got it set up so it's only going to do 60 FPS soon as I booted this up all of the buttons worked I didn't have to do any kind of remapping or anything like that it just worked right out of the box and if you've got a good router then you're going to see some good performance out of Ste steam link or Moonlight one thing I always try to do with uh game streaming is make sure that the PC I'm streaming from has a wired connection so my main gaming PC is plugged in Ethernet right now we're just on Wi-Fi with this obviously but it does kind of alleviate you know having two wireless signals there having my PC on ethernet really helps out another thing I wanted to do with this device was just test the thermal performance now we do have that built-in cooling fan and with my test I have it in smart mode where at high performance I just ran for about 11 minutes here this is stressing out all eight cores to 100% I mean that's as far as we can take it right now the fan itself is a bit louder than I thought it would be given that it's working with such a small blower style it doesn't sound like a jet engine or anything like that but you can definitely hear it now jacking up your games volume to around 50 to 60% does kind of drown that out but in my 11-minute test in high performance mode with that fan set to Smart we didn't see any kind of major thermal throttling so you can play this all day with your favorite games and this is more of an extreme test because it's maxing out all eight cores at 100% while you're playing a game you're not going to be putting the kind of load on the system that we're seeing here and the maximum CPU temperature that I saw by the end of my run here was only 62° C so we're well under thermal throttle and when it comes to overall battery life it's actually looking pretty good now it's going to depend on what you're doing with the device for instance I ran a demo of GBA just using retro art screen at 100% brightness I Got 5 hours and 54 minutes of runtime out of this now with a stress test maxing out all eight cores to 100% 2 hours and 9 minutes so it's going to be all over the place depending on what you're doing but mixed use you're probably in the 4H hour range which really isn't too bad First Impressions here for the retroid pocket 4 Pro love the Forum Factor they do offer a bunch of different color options I kind of wish that we did have a conductive pad under this d-pad here you know with the Dome switches and the way they have it it does work I can pull off my special moves I can play my favorite Platformers without missing a hit we're also looking at some really decent battery life now one thing I'd love to see changed here is uh just the fan profile they have we've got the smart and Sport even in smart it can get a bit loud it's a little Annoying if you've got the volume down but like I mentioned I mean at about 50% volume playing a game it's not too noticeable it' just be nice to be able to take that down a bit more because we're definitely not hitting thermal throttle with that thing maxed out so yeah I've been really enjoying the retroid pocket 4 Pro and with a price tag of $199 it's kind of hard to beat this now there are more powerful Android based handhelds out there like the Odin 2 but you know that's coming in at around 332 for the base and they're really hard to get your hands on so this actually might be a great option for a lot of people out there I've personally been having a lot of fun with this thing and if you're interested in learning a little more maybe picking one up I'll leave some links in the description and I will have another video coming up so let me know what you want to see running on this device in the comments below but that's it for this one like always thanks for watching\n"