The R40S is here…another RGB30 Clone?

We have had about a year now seeing most all the popular quirky Chinese emulation handhelds being honored by Cloning. People have been cloning their pets since the introduction of Snuppy, an Afghan hound cloned in Seoul, South Korea in 2005. Like most current cloning efforts attempts have been made in many of these handhelds to improve their performance sometimes with great success. We are going to checkout the BOYHOM R40S and a brief history of the company behind the curtains past efforts in this space. If you have any interest in any of the handhelds discussed here I will post links for each device at the end of the article.

BOYHOM has been behind some of the more successful of the emulation handheld efforts. Starting with the R35S (Powkiddy’s RGB20) which was quickly followed up by the R36S while some behind the scenes efforts to pull the R35S (review here) from Chinese re-seller websites like AliExpress were underway. The R36S wasn’t a hidden gem long before reviewers such as myself got ahold of them and published our results on popular websites such as YouTube, Reddit and the like. Quickly the R36S (review here) became in many circles the “Budget King” of Retro Handhelds.

Boasting a decent build quality and powerful internals for months after the R36S’s launch there was nothing that could touch it in the sub $40 price point. The device isn’t perfect, mostly having firmware issues out of the box because there is no official firmware build but has since been remedied with community support. It also has DPad issues that can mostly be fixed with a piece of tape and the joysticks are sub par. But it performed better than anything at this price point for a good run. The R36S has demanded such a following that new colors are still coming out (Red and Blue being most recent). I even recently made a video updating the R36S to have better features, for example GuiliKit Halleffect Joysticks (image above right). You can check out the full upgrade video here.

They also launched the R33S (review here) which has been mostly blocked from sales in western countries. The R33S is a clone of the GOAT in retro emulation the Miyoo Mini Plus (comparison review here). I have a couple of what seems to be the few R33S’s to make it to the US and they did some of their best work on this handheld. On top of styling, they similarly greatly improved the performance making it one of the best price to performance handhelds in market. I still prefer my Miyoo because it has OnionOS but the R33S running ArkOS is very tempting offer.

~Somewhere around here there was the R43 Pro / M18 (checkout review here). It’s never been clear if BOYHOM has anything to do with the production of this handheld. SJGAM sells it as the M18 along with there lineup of the M17 and new M19. It’s not uncommon for manufacturers to sell the same handhelds under their own name and branding in this space. This particular device was plagued with inaccurate performance claims on boxes and within marketing, along with mismatched SOC’s (I got 2 of these and SOC was drastically different in each).

There is the R50S in the lineup too. The R50S like the R33S hasn’t been readily available to the western public and with its RK3326 SOC its the only device in their lineup that greatly underperforms its parent handheld. I can’t say that from testing but I have tested dozens of rk3326 handhelds and it being a clone of the Powkiddy x55 running the RK3566 it’s safe to assume along with its smaller screen it won’t perform nearly as well. This is why it’s the only BOYHOM handheld I haven’t aggressively hunted down to review.

Now BOYHOM has introduce the R40S. This is pretty obviously playing homage the the Powkiddy RGB30 (custom build video here). A very popular 4” 1:1 handheld that I personally believe single handedly introduced Pico8 virtual console to most of the world. Powkiddy followed this up with the RGB20SX a vertical version of the RGB30. Seeing as BOYHOM has a track record of cloning Powkiddy handhelds and their first device was the RGB20, I would be interested to see if they follow up with an RGB20SX type emulator themselves.

We don’t see the typical performance increase in the R40S we have come to know from their previous handhelds but we do see a near 1 to 1 match. I would be interested to know if it actually has WiFi and Bluetooth as it’s been advertised and not present in previous BOYHOM handhelds. This may be in part because most all the clones they have chosen to make host the RK3356 SOC (bulk SOC buys likely drive the price down). I have compiled (above) the specs for both the R40S and Powkiddy RGB30 to help visualize the differences. Somehow even with the RGB30 being 8mm thicker and ever so slightly larger battery it ends up being 4g’s lighter.

I like the look of the R40S and wonder if the launch time has something to do with the upcoming Anbernic “Cube” and the ZPG Unicorn A1 (below). This is a common practice to see multiple similar handhelds coming at the same time as the chip manufacturers seem to even sell SOC’s from competing companies to each other. We saw this when the R35S showed up at our doors with an SOC stamped RGB20.

This handheld has caught my attention more so than their last couple offerings. I skipped on reviewing the RGB30 a couple of times but once I finally pulled the trigger I really found myself enjoying it. Even though similar I’m debating seeing about reviewing this handheld. With the same SOC we have seen drastic differences between similar devices just in how efficiently they set them up.

As always as we learn more I’ll keep you posted. If I decide to review the R40S I’ll let you know right here on RetroSpecd.gg.

GameOn

Links below for the handhelds in this article:

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