Earlier this year I found myself suddenly coveting a retro handheld. If you’re not familiar, they’re small gaming devices, typically running Linux or Android, that are designed to play old games from an SD card. It’s a pretty crazy market — there are several Chinese companies churning out multiple new models each year, and usually when you buy one it comes with thousands of games pre-loaded, which these Chinese companies obviously have a license to distribute. From there you can install custom operating systems and so on, and generally have a lot of fun.

Choosing a retro device is the tricky part. The cheaper Linux ones are really cheap, we’re talking like £30 new. Even the cheapest retro systems will generally play anything up to and including PlayStation 1 games. There are so many, all shapes and sizes with different capabilities and features (and, being quite cheap Chinese products, usually with their own strange quirks). I fell for the Gameboy Advance SP-style clamshell devices. I love the pocketability, and for me that’s a very nostalgic system. There are a few to choose from in this category, but the one I fell for was the Miyoo Flip.

With the RK3566 chip, it has a little more power than the Anbernic competitors, able to play a decent number of N64, Dreamcast, DS, and PSP games. It also has two analogue sticks, making it ideal for playing a lot of ported PC games, some indie favourites and some old classics. Closing the clamshell lid puts it to sleep, ready to pick up and resume in an instant.[1] And it still comes in at an affordable £60ish (prices of these thigns fluctuates quite a lot and can vary by distributor and whether it comes with games and extra storage and so on).

Anyway, I got it, and I loved it. Was this device the key to finally getting around to playing all those old classics I’d missed? Or how about revisiting favourites from my childhood? It was awesome. You could even plug it into the TV and easily pair with Dualshock 4 controllers, so my wife and I were able to play Streets Of Rage 2 and others.

And then the hinge cracked, after just a few weeks. Every review had warned that the hinge was fragile. But the reviews were from last year, V1 of the Miyoo Flip. With the V2, Miyoo promised the hinge was fixed, and this was a V2. They even gave a hinge guarantee. Unfortunately, since I hadn’t bought mine directly from Miyoo, I didn’t have the hinge guarantee. They also had a new model, the V2.1, which they promised had an even stronger (and silent) hinge. So I bought a new V2.1 from Miyoo to get that guarantee, and a new V2.1 hinge so I could repair the old one and give it to a friend.

During the repair of the old Flip, I accidentally broke the screen… so I bought another screen, and another V2.1 hinge, as the hinge includes the module that connects to the screen and I think houses the WiFi, and I was struggling to disconnect it from the screen without damaging it due to strong adhesive. So now I have two Flips, both with V2.1 hinges (and working screens).

My friend doesn’t have a laptop or desktop, so I started the fun task of setting my friend up with a banging selection of games and configuring his device. And even while doing this relatively light use of the device — not taking it out with me, not playing it for any extended periods, just opening it to test things were working — a crack appeared in the hinge. The supposedly now super-robust V2.1 silent hinge! So I’ve superglued this crack and carried on.

Meanwhile, I managed to enjoy my repaired Flip for around 2 weeks, before the hinge gave up and went floppy. Wouldn’t stay in the closed or open position. Rather than use my “hinge guarantee” straight away, I decided to have one more go at disconnecting the broken screen from the working V2.1 hinge. I heated a dinner plate in the microwave and put the broken screen on it until it was hot enough to peel off the screen/wifi module without bending it, and thus was able to disconnect the screen from the hinge. And so once again, I disassembled the entire Flip to replace the darn hinge, which involves a very fiddly bit with a ribbon cable in an awkward position that usually takes as long to do as the rest of the repair. All-in-all the repair now takes me around 25 minutes, as this is now the third time I’ve replaced a Miyoo Flip hinge, and a large part of that is trying to slip one ribbon cable into the most awkward connector.

I managed to enjoy my Flip for another 2 weeks before another crack appeared in the hinge. Exact same place as on my friend’s machine, so when I gave my friend my other Flip, we had matching superglued cracks.

I love the Flip, it’s like my ideal handheld. I don’t want to move to a lower-powered Anbernic clamshell device, or one without sticks. I just want a Flip with a robust hinge. The bizarre thing is, Miyoo make another clamshell called the Mini Flip and the hinge is fine, and yet 3 generations of hinge designs on the original Flip and they still can’t do it? I’m not even going to use my hinge guarantee at this stage — I’ve had 4 hinges break, and all they’ll do is send another hinge, and I’ll have to take the darn thing apart again, and I’m just done it with.

I’ll play this one to death until the superglue fails. If Miyoo bring out a V3, and the reviews look good, maybe I’ll give them one more chance. Until then, I picked up a Powkiddy RGB30 off eBay for £26, and they’re about £85 new. The guy sold it so cheap because “it didn’t have any games on”, so I’ve basically saved £60 for the price of copying a folder from one SD card to another. Don’t get a Miyoo Flip, however perfect the device may seem to a clamshell lover. It will only break your heart.

  1. My Pocket Reform, with its RK3588 chip, does not yet have this capability, despite being nearly 20 times more expensive. ↩︎