Anbernic RG351P: Great Screen, No Wi-Fi
The Anbernic RG351P is a good handheld with one omission that decides whether you should buy it: there is no Wi-Fi. Not weak Wi-Fi, not unreliable Wi-Fi — no radio. Anbernic added one on the later RG351V and RG351MP, but not on this model. Every ROM you add goes on by pulling the microSD card out and putting it in a computer.
If that is fine with you, the rest of the device is genuinely good for the money and the screen is better suited to Game Boy Advance than anything else in this price class.
What it is
The RG351P is a commercial version of Hardkernel’s ODROID-GO Advance. It runs a Rockchip RK3326, four Cortex-A35 cores at 1.5 GHz, with 1 GB of RAM, and it boots Linux straight into an emulation frontend. There is no general-purpose operating system underneath, which is the point: it turns on in a few seconds and shows you a game list.
The shell is matte plastic, solid, with a proper D-pad and two small analogue sticks below it. It is 2020 hardware and it does not pretend otherwise.
The screen is the best thing about it
The 3.5-inch IPS panel is 480x320, which is 3:2. That number matters more than it looks: a Game Boy Advance is 240x160, so the RG351P is exactly double in both axes. GBA games scale by a clean factor of two, with no interpolation and no rows of pixels being wider than their neighbours. Almost nothing else at this size does that.
The trade-off is everything that is 4:3. SNES, Mega Drive and PS1 all have to be either letterboxed with black bars at the sides or scaled by a non-integer factor that softens edges. Neither looks bad, but neither is the clean fit that GBA gets. If your library is mostly 16-bit rather than GBA, a 640x480 handheld will serve you better.
What it emulates, honestly
NES, SNES, Master System, Mega Drive, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, GBA, Neo Geo and the arcade sets of that era all run at full speed and are not worth discussing further — they simply work.
PlayStation 1 is the headline and it holds up. The RK3326 runs the PS1 catalogue at full speed with only the usual emulator-specific exceptions.
Nintendo 64 is a coin flip. Some games are fine, several are not, and which is which depends on the emulator core as much as the hardware. Treat N64 as a bonus rather than a reason to buy.
Dreamcast and PSP do not work usefully. One gigabyte of RAM and this SoC are not enough, whatever a video of one specific game booting might suggest. If you want those, you want an Android handheld instead.
No Wi-Fi, and what that actually costs you
This is the section the spec sheets bury, so here is the practical list.
Adding games means physically removing the microSD card every time. That is fine when you set the device up and load two hundred games at once; it is annoying when you want to add one game on a Tuesday.
RetroAchievements does not work. Neither does netplay, nor cloud save syncing, nor scraping box art directly on the device — you scrape on the computer and copy the results across with the card.
Firmware updates are manual, which in practice means reflashing a card.
There is no Bluetooth either, so no wireless controller — not that it would help, since there is no video output to plug into a TV.
A 2.4 GHz USB Wi-Fi dongle does work with ArkOS and restores most of the above. It also occupies the USB port, sticks out of the side, and has to come off before the console goes in a bag. It is a workaround, and worth calling one.
Setting it up
The stock firmware works, but nobody keeps it. The setup is short:
- Get a microSD card and a reader. Class 10 or better; 128 GB is a sensible size for everything up to PS1.
- Download ArkOS or AmberELEC (formerly 351ELEC) and write the image to the card with Balena Etcher. Fifteen minutes, most of it waiting.
- Put the card back in the computer once it has been written and copy your ROMs into the per-system folders it created.
- Scrape box art on the computer with Skraper or Skyscraper, since the device cannot do it itself.
- Insert the card, hold power, and you are in the game list.
ArkOS is the more configurable of the two and lets you pick emulator cores per system. AmberELEC arrives with sensible defaults already set and is the one to choose if you would rather not tune anything. Both are better than what ships in the box.
Controls and battery
The D-pad and face buttons are good — short travel, clean actuation, no mushiness. This is the part Anbernic has consistently got right.
The analogue sticks are the weak point. They are small, low-profile and positioned below the D-pad, inherited from the ODROID-GO Advance layout. For PS1 games that want both sticks they are workable rather than comfortable, and for anything twin-stick they are unpleasant.
The 3500 mAh battery lands around six to seven hours in normal use, less with PS1 and full brightness. It charges over USB-C and runs happily from a power bank mid-game, which is the usual answer for a long journey.
Worth it if, skip if
Worth it if you mostly play Game Boy Advance and 16-bit games, you want a device that boots into a game list and asks nothing else of you, and you are happy loading games in batches from a computer. On that description it is hard to beat at the price.
Skip it if you want Dreamcast or PSP, if you use RetroAchievements, if most of your library is 4:3 and you care about how it fills the screen, or if the idea of a handheld with no network in 2025 bothers you. The Retroid Pocket 2+ covers all four, and that comparison goes through the differences in detail.
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