Miyoo A30: Does it live up to the Miyoo Mini?

The Miyoo Mini A30 is coming off the backs of the successful Miyoo Mini and Miyoo Mini Plus! Two extremely adored Emulation Handhelds that helped shape the Retro Gaming industry and had the likes of Anbernic with their RG35XX left chasing them for about 2 years.

Video Review Miyoo A30

But do they live up to the hype? After an unboxing and initial first look at the handheld it leaves me asking for more. With the amount of time and hype behind the A30 it came out feeling unfinished. The emulators were left either not setup or setup incorrectly causing even the easiest to emulate SNES games to be underpowered for example. Then there is the screen brightness. This is a device you were unable to see outdoors even on a semi-cloudy day.

I was  beyond disappointed in my initial look at the handheld. I spent some time messing around with over clocking and removing filters that didn’t belong on different emulators. I was able to get the handheld to get close to the performance of the Miyoo Mini  when running it on stock software. It was better but far from an optimal experience.

The handheld heavens must have been listening because just as I got the device setup to where I felt I could use it on a daily basis it was brought to my attention that there was a firmware update release to fix the screen brightness issue. Now I would be able to play it while waiting in the parent line picking up the kids from school.

To my surprise when I went to the Miyoo firmware update page I  found not 1 but 2 firmware updates. The second update was to correct the issues with emulators. I got both installed and the handheld started performing exactly the way I have  gotten used to a launch device operating from any manufacturer. It is now a decent plug and play handheld begging for custom firmware to bring it to that next level. Even if it can’t get to the level of the Miyoo Mini and Mini Plus there is a lot of opportunity here.

The good news is the team behind OnionOS (the ever popular  firmware for the Miyoo devices that every other cfw aspires to be) has had the A30 in there hands since just prior to launch. What we don’t know is if they are going to port over their firmware or leave it to others to create new packages. The A30 has a joystick and vertical screen. These are two things the OnionOS team hasn’t had to deal with in the past. There is an expectation out there that if they take on the A30 then they will likely take on Myioo’s  new flip when it releases as well. That’s a lot of pressure on a small dev team working for tip on buy me coffee (or wherever it is they take donations).

In conclusion the initial experience was crap to put it frankly. That is however the disadvantage of being an early adapter. My expectations for Miyoo products is pretty unrealistic in this industry as I didn’t get the Miyoo Mini until after the release of OnionOS so I don’t know first hand how bad it was before. I know it was bad enough to get a dev team to write the firmware for OnionOS but I don’t really know what  that means. Now  that I have updated the firmware the A30 performs better than many comparable devices when they launch. Some of those don’t get any additional firmware options where the A30 has a few already just not the big dog Onion we are waiting for.

The entire experience leaves me asking why they had these firmware updates ready at launch and didn’t install them prior to shipping the device? Maybe they spent  months waiting on shelves while they waited for the announcement of the Anbernic RG28XX launch? Miyoo did put the A30 sale up at the same time to match Anbernic and leave customers to decide which they would prefer. I don’t know if that strategy worked out but it did leave customers like me wondering where I could best spend my money. Oddly the RG28XX also launched with a slew of issues (which haven’t been fixed yet video review is on YouTube written review coming soon). The A30 feels and operates like a different device since that unboxing. I guess you could say it was a 2  for 1 if you don’t mind 1 of them being extremely frustrating.

Later this week we are going to see the launch of the Anbernic RG35XXSP. A new flip handheld offering. We have been seeing images of a Miyoo Flip longer than we’ve known about Anbernics offering. Are we going to see a battle for yet another space between Miyoo and Anbernic? Will Miyoo customers loyalty line up for their flip handheld or do they feel burned be ause of the state the A30 launched in?