Anbernic RG35XX vs Miyoo Mini Plus: The £60 Handheld Fight

The Miyoo Mini Plus didn’t invent the pocketable, clamshell-less retro handheld, but it’s the device that made the format a genuine craze rather than a niche hobbyist purchase. A 3.5-inch 640×480 IPS screen, a shell barely bigger than the screen itself, and a sub-£60 price turned it into the default recommendation across forums and video reviews for the better part of two years. Anbernic, the largest volume manufacturer in this space, didn’t have a direct answer at that exact size and price point for a while — and when the RG35XX arrived, it read unmistakably as a response to a device that had been eating Anbernic’s lunch in one specific segment. The question worth asking almost two years on isn’t just which is better on spec. It’s whether Anbernic actually closed the gap that let Miyoo win that segment in the first place, or just matched the numbers on the box.

What made the Miyoo Mini Plus the one to beat

The original appeal, laid out in full in our separate look at the best sub-£100 retro handhelds, wasn’t complicated: a genuinely excellent screen for the price — bright, reasonably accurate colour, none of the washed-out panels that plagued cheaper handhelds before it — in a shell small enough to disappear into a jacket pocket, running OnionOS, a custom firmware that matured faster and more thoroughly than most of its rivals’ default software. OnionOS’s box-art-driven interface, reliable save states and well-tuned emulator core selection made the Miyoo Mini Plus feel finished in a way plenty of similarly priced competitors didn’t at the time, even though the hardware underneath — an Allwinner-family SoC roughly comparable to what several rivals were shipping — was not dramatically more capable than the competition on paper. The software experience, more than the silicon, is what built the reputation.

What the RG35XX actually changed

Anbernic’s RG35XX matches the Miyoo Mini Plus’s 3.5-inch 640×480 IPS panel almost spec-for-spec and undercuts or matches it on price depending on region and retailer, but the meaningful change is in the shell and the stock software rather than the screen. The RG35XX’s D-pad and face buttons draw on Anbernic’s much longer manufacturing history with handheld controls specifically — the company has been iterating on stick and button feel across a dozen prior models — and it shows in slightly crisper D-pad response that several independent reviews single out as a genuine improvement over the Miyoo’s pad. More importantly, Anbernic shipped the RG35XX with its own take on GarlicOS as effectively the stock firmware rather than a bare manufacturer skin, borrowing directly from custom-firmware conventions that Anbernic’s own older stock software had historically lagged behind on. That’s the closest thing to an open acknowledgement that the box-art interface and tuned emulation cores Miyoo’s community had built were the actual thing worth copying, not just the shell size.

Where Miyoo still has the edge

The Mini Plus retains a size advantage that matters for anyone whose priority is genuine pocket disappearance rather than button feel — it’s marginally smaller and lighter than the RG35XX in most direct size comparisons, and OnionOS’s several-year head start still shows in a handful of system-specific configuration niceties that Anbernic’s GarlicOS variant has only caught up to recently, particularly around per-core shader and overlay options for specific consoles. Miyoo’s own community has also had longer to build a stable relationship between the OnionOS project and the specific hardware revisions Miyoo ships, which shows up as marginally fewer reports of firmware update hiccups compared to some of the RG35XX’s more fragmented sub-variant lineup — the RG35XX name now covers several hardware revisions (RG35XX, RG35XX Plus, RG35XX H with an added analogue stick) that don’t all take the same firmware builds cleanly, a genuine point of confusion Miyoo’s simpler one-model lineup avoids.

The build comparison

Neither shell is metal — both are moulded ABS-family plastic, which is standard for the whole price bracket and not a mark against either device specifically. The RG35XX’s shell has a slightly thicker wall section around the shoulder buttons that several teardowns note produces a marginally more solid in-hand feel, while the Miyoo Mini Plus’s thinner shell keeps its size and weight advantage but flexes a little more under firm grip. Both use broadly comparable membrane-backed button switches rather than genuine mechanical microswitches — this is a budget category, and neither device pretends otherwise at this price. Battery capacity is close enough between the two that real-world runtime differences come down more to screen brightness setting and which emulation cores are running than to any meaningful cell-size advantage on either side.

Neither win matters without the card and firmware choice

Whichever shell wins the argument above, the actual day-to-day experience on both devices is determined less by the hardware than by the SD card running the OS and library, and by which firmware build ends up installed — a point covered in full in our separate look at the SD-card and firmware side of this hobby. A Miyoo Mini Plus running a counterfeit or slow card will feel worse than an RG35XX running a genuine A2-rated card, and vice versa, to the point that the handheld choice in this piece matters less to the final experience than getting that one supporting purchase right. It’s worth reading both pieces together before buying either device, because a wrong card choice will undo whichever shell-and-firmware advantage tips the decision here.

Battery life and charging in practice

Both devices are specified in the same rough band — Anbernic quotes several hours of continuous play for the RG35XX family, and Miyoo’s figures for the Mini Plus sit close enough that the difference in practice comes down more to screen brightness and which system’s emulation core is running than to a meaningful difference in cell capacity. Both charge over USB-C, which means either handheld slots into the same charging cable and power bank as a phone, avoiding the proprietary-charger problem that dogged an earlier generation of budget handhelds. Neither device supports pass-through charge-while-playing reliably across all firmware versions — a firmware-level limitation rather than a hardware one, and one that’s occasionally fixed and occasionally reintroduced across firmware updates on both sides, so it’s worth checking current firmware release notes rather than assuming either device behaves consistently on this specific point.

What both chip classes can and can’t actually run

Both devices sit in the same rough emulation ceiling: near-flawless on everything through the 16-bit era, GBA and original PlayStation, and generally playable but inconsistent on the more demanding end of PS1’s library and early Nintendo 64 titles, where frame-pacing hiccups show up on both devices during busy scenes. Neither is a realistic pick for Dreamcast, PSP or GameCube-class emulation — that’s a different, more expensive tier of handheld with a meaningfully more powerful chip, and buyers coming from either the RG35XX or Miyoo camp expecting to grow into those systems on the same hardware will be disappointed. For the specific window both devices target — everything from the 8-bit era through GBA and PS1 comfortably, N64 as a genuine bonus rather than a guarantee — either is a legitimate, capable choice, and the difference between them is felt far more in day-to-day handling and firmware polish than in raw emulation capability.

The honest case against buying either

For anyone who already owns a Miyoo Mini (the original, not the Plus) or an earlier RG35XX revision in good working order, neither of these represents enough of a generational leap to justify replacing a working device — the screen, chip class and rough firmware feature set haven’t moved dramatically between recent generations in this specific size and price tier, and the money is better spent on a card and firmware upgrade for the device already owned. The category has genuinely useful hardware jumps at the more expensive tiers — larger screens, added analogue sticks, more powerful chips capable of later console generations — and anyone whose library has already outgrown what either of these two chips can comfortably emulate should be looking a tier up rather than sideways between these two.

The verdict

Buy either at this price point in good conscience, but the RG35XX is the one to reach for first now, and specifically because Anbernic answered the right question: it didn’t just match the Miyoo Mini Plus’s screen and price, it adopted the software philosophy — a mature, box-art-driven, well-tuned firmware — that actually made the Mini Plus the device to beat in the first place. That is the repeat-visit question this match-up turns on, and the honest answer is that Anbernic mostly fixed what was wrong rather than simply moving the badge. Choose the RG35XX specifically if D-pad feel matters to you more than absolute pocketability, or if the added analogue stick on the RG35XX H variant matters for the systems you plan to play. Choose the Miyoo Mini Plus if the smallest possible footprint is the priority and you’re comfortable navigating a single, stable hardware revision rather than Anbernic’s now-sprawling RG35XX family. Skip both only if your library leans on systems demanding more raw power than either chip class offers — anything requiring the extra headroom of the more expensive Anbernic RG40XX-tier devices — in which case this specific fight isn’t the one you need to be having. At £45–£65 depending on retailer and region, neither is a bad way to spend the money; the RG35XX is simply the one that learned the right lesson from its rival.