Miyoo Mini Plus vs RG35XX 2026: 5h Battery, 2x RAM

Two handhelds. One screen size. A fifteen-dollar gap, give or take, depending on which week the listings refresh. On paper the Miyoo Mini Plus and the Anbernic RG35XX look like the same idea drawn by two different committees: a 3.5-inch retro brick that fits in a coat pocket and emulates everything up to the original PlayStation with varying degrees of conviction. Spend ten minutes inside either device's custom firmware and the resemblance collapses. These are opposite philosophies wearing matching shirts.

This is the comparison the forums have been re-litigating since 2023, and it has only gotten more tangled now that Anbernic shipped a successor that quietly rewrites the math. We are going to settle it with numbers, not vibes — benchmarks pulled from reviewers who actually held the hardware, a spec table that does not flinch, and a verdict that names a winner for each kind of buyer instead of pretending one device rules them all. The Machine does not do fence-sitting. The Machine does do footnotes.

The Verdict in 90 Seconds

If you skim one section, skim this one, then come back when a stranger on Reddit tells you something that contradicts it.

What you are actually choosing between

The Miyoo Mini Plus is a software-first device. Its hardware is modest — a 1.2 GHz ARM Cortex-A7, a frankly stingy 128MB of RAM — but it runs OnionOS, a community firmware so polished it makes the silicon feel faster than it is. It has Wi-Fi, a USB-C port, and a 3000mAh battery that outlasts its rival by a comfortable margin. It is the device people describe as 'jewel-like' without irony.

The Anbernic RG35XX is a hardware-first device. It doubles the Miyoo's memory to 256MB, runs the slightly punchier Cortex-A9, adds a second microSD slot and a micro-HDMI output so you can throw Chrono Trigger onto a television. It runs GarlicOS, which is excellent but less magical, and it charges over the elderly micro-USB standard with a smaller 2100mAh cell that taps out around the three-hour mark. It is the device people buy when they want options.

The one-line answer

Buy the Miyoo Mini Plus if you want the best handheld experience in your pocket and you will mostly play 8- and 16-bit libraries on the move. Buy an RG35XX — and specifically, in 2026, the RG35XX Plus — if you want the most capability for the dollar, plan to drive a TV, or expect to push into Dreamcast and Nintendo DS. The base RG35XX is now a price-driven pick; the Plus is the one that changes the argument.

Who should stop reading now

If your library ends at the Super Nintendo and Game Boy Advance, both devices play every game you own at full speed, and the decision is purely about which face you would rather look at on your desk. Flip a coin, or skip to the build section where the coin is weighted. Everyone else — the netplay crowd, the TV crowd, the Dreamcast hopefuls, the people who have heard 'just get the Plus' and want to know why — stay.

Specs, Head to Head

Here is the whole argument compressed into one grid. Read it twice. The interesting fights are not where you expect.

The full comparison table

Reading the silicon: A7 versus A9

The CPU row is where casual buyers nod and move on, and they are wrong to. Both chips clock at 1.2 GHz, so the spec sheet implies parity. The architectures say otherwise. The Miyoo's Cortex-A7 is an in-order design: it executes instructions in the sequence it receives them, which is power-thrifty but stalls when an emulator hands it unpredictable, branchy code. It does carry hardware integer-division instructions, a genuine efficiency win for certain workloads. The RG35XX's Cortex-A9 is out-of-order: it reschedules instructions on the fly to keep its pipeline fed, which costs battery but extracts more real work per clock from exactly the kind of heavy emulation that makes a handheld sweat.

Translate that into plain English and you get the entire battery-versus-grunt trade in two words. The A7 sips; the A9 pushes. This is not marketing — it is the reason the Miyoo lasts longer on Pokémon and the RG35XX holds its frame rate on the GBA games that choke lesser chips. The named comparison at gogamegeek frames the A7's efficiency and division support as its standout advantage, and that tracks with how the two devices behave in the hand.

Where the spec sheet lies

The RAM row reads like a rout — 256MB versus 128MB, double the memory — and in custom-firmware environments that headroom genuinely matters for menu responsiveness, box art caching, and not having the system thrash when you alt-tab between a game and the file browser. But here is the lie: more RAM does not make the RG35XX feel faster, because OnionOS is so aggressively optimized that the Miyoo's 128MB rarely becomes the bottleneck you would predict. The numbers favor Anbernic. The experience, for most users most of the time, does not. Hold that thought; it is the whole story of these two machines. If you want to understand how much of that experience is firmware rather than hardware, our breakdown of the 6,041-game OnionOS build for the Miyoo Mini Plus shows what 128MB can do when the software respects it.

Same Panel, Different Glass

On the one spec that should be a tie, it almost is — and the 'almost' is where reviewers spend their paragraphs.

640x480 on 3.5 inches

Both handhelds carry a 3.5-inch IPS display at 640x480, a 4:3 panel that is, for retro purposes, close to ideal. The 480p vertical resolution is exactly double the 240p output of the consoles you are emulating, which means systems like the SNES and Genesis scale with clean integer math and no shimmer. The detailed teardown-style comparison at MiyooDIY confirms the panels are spec-identical, which is why side-by-side screen shots in reviews look like the same photo printed twice. Anyone telling you the Miyoo has a 2.8-inch screen is describing the original Miyoo Mini, not the Plus. The Plus matched Anbernic's diagonal exactly.

Brightness, color, and the side-by-side test

The differences are in the glass and the backlight, not the resolution. In the community comparison on Lemmy.World, reviewer barry_budapest put it precisely: “The colors on the Miyoo Mini Plus look slightly better, but I can only really tell having them side by side.” That is the honest version of every screen comparison you will read — the Miyoo's color rendering edges ahead, the RG35XX's backlight gets a touch brighter at its peak and slightly dimmer at its floor, and unless you are holding both devices in the same hand under the same lamp, you will never notice. The RG35XX also runs its speaker a little louder and marginally cleaner, which matters more in a noisy commute than the color delta does.

Scaling and integer math

Because both panels are 640x480, the practical advice is identical: enable integer scaling for pixel-art systems and accept the black bars, or use a CRT shader to fill the frame with something that flatters the source. Both firmwares ship the usual scanline and LCD-grid presets, and both render them without a visible performance hit on 16-bit content. If you are the kind of player who tunes shader stacks per system, you will be equally happy — or equally lost down a rabbit hole — on either device. Our guide to building out 200 RetroArch cores in 14 steps applies cleanly to both, since the underlying libretro plumbing is shared.

Performance: What Actually Runs

Specs predict; play confirms. Here is what reviewers measured, drawn from three independent camps so you are not trusting a single set of eyes.

8- and 16-bit: a genuine wash

Nobody who has used both devices argues about the low end. NES, SNES, Genesis, Master System, PC Engine, Game Boy and Game Boy Color all run at full speed on either machine with cycles to spare. The Miyoo's tighter firmware actually gives it the edge in responsiveness here — faster boot, faster load, snappier menus — even though the RG35XX has the beefier core. This is the recurring pattern: in light workloads, optimization beats raw silicon, and the Miyoo's software is simply better tuned. If your collection lives in this era, consult our top 12 Miyoo Mini Plus picks and stop agonizing over benchmarks that will never apply to you.

GBA, the real dividing line

The Game Boy Advance is where the A7-versus-A9 architecture stops being trivia. Most GBA games run fine on both, but the demanding ones — the titles with heavy effects, large sprite counts, or aggressive scaling — separate the chips. Reviewers consistently report that the RG35XX pushes the heavy hitters like DrillDozer and Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga with noticeably less slowdown than the Miyoo, exactly as the out-of-order A9 architecture predicts. The Miyoo handles them; it just dips frames where the Anbernic holds steady. If GBA is the ceiling of your ambitions and you play the demanding end of that catalogue, this is a real, repeatable point in Anbernic's column.

PS1, DS, Dreamcast and the RG35XX Plus question

Original PlayStation is the genuine frontier for the base devices: lighter PS1 titles are playable, heavier 3D ones are a gamble on both. Neither base machine has a discrete GPU worth the name, so 3D is software-rasterized and fragile. This is precisely where the RG35XX Plus rewrites the comparison. The successor swaps in the Allwinner H700, 1GB of LPDDR4, and a 3300mAh battery, and it carries a real GPU. Reviewing it for Retro Dodo, Brandon Saltalamacchia summarized the leap bluntly: “PSP emulation is hit and miss, but Dreamcast and below is close to flawless on this thing which is incredible.” That is a class the base RG35XX and the Miyoo simply cannot enter. Independent testing cited by Pocket Retro Gaming puts roughly 80–90% of Dreamcast titles at full speed on the Plus under Vulkan-capable firmware — a benchmark neither original device can approach. At DROIX, reviewer DaveC noted that the H700 “provides a decent performance increase over the original with faster performance on PlayStation 1 and Dreamcast,” and concluded that “if you are looking to buy your first handheld then the Anbernic RG35XX Plus is one to go for. It out performs the RG35XX and Miyoo Mini Plus.” When you reach the wall on either base device, the answer is rarely the other base device — it is a PS2-class machine like the Retroid Pocket 6, which we reviewed for exactly this upgrade path.

OnionOS vs GarlicOS

You are not really buying hardware. You are buying an operating system that happens to ship attached to hardware. This section decides more purchases than the spec table does.

What OnionOS does that stock does not

OnionOS is the reason the Miyoo Mini Plus has a cult. It is a community-built firmware whose marquee feature, the Game Switcher, lets you tap the menu button, scroll a carousel of recently played titles, and resume any of them at the exact frame you left — across different systems, near-instantly. It is the single most-imitated idea in the handheld space, and on the Miyoo it is fast and frictionless. Writing for TechReviewsUK, René R. did not hedge: “OnionOS is simply phenomenal – fast, polished, intuitive and packed with clever features.” Even the gogamegeek comparison, which leans Anbernic on raw capability, concedes that on the software question “the miyoo has a far better custom OS.” The Wi-Fi radio compounds the advantage: RetroAchievements, online netplay, and SSH access into the device's filesystem are all live on the Miyoo and absent on the base RG35XX. The canonical firmware lives on the OnionUI GitHub repository, which is worth bookmarking for the changelog alone.

GarlicOS and the HDMI play

GarlicOS is not a lesser project — it is a different bet. Built to leverage the RG35XX's hardware, its trump card is driving the device's HDMI output, turning the handheld into a tiny set-top console. It is clean, it is reliable, and for day-to-day use some people prefer it outright. The same Lemmy reviewer who praised the Miyoo's build admitted: “I actually honestly prefer the GarlicOS experience for day to day gaming as it's a little faster to boot up.” That is the fair read — GarlicOS is great; it simply feels less mature than OnionOS, and it asks for more setup to reach the same polish. If your end goal is the living-room television rather than the bus seat, GarlicOS plus HDMI is a workflow OnionOS structurally cannot match, and you can extend it further by pairing the device with a desktop emulation distro like the one in our Batocera 4.3 USB install in 12 steps.

Save states, RetroAchievements, shaders, netplay

On the table-stakes features the two firmwares are near-identical: both offer per-game save states, both ship the full menu of CRT and scanline shaders, both auto-resume. The divergences map directly to hardware. Netplay and RetroAchievements require a radio, so they are Miyoo-only on the base comparison. HDMI output requires the port, so it is RG35XX-only. Everything else — the part you touch a hundred times a day — comes down to which menu philosophy you would rather live inside, and OnionOS wins that contest more often than not.

Battery, Charging & USB-C

This is the category where the Miyoo lands its cleanest punch, and where the successor model complicates the scoreboard.

3000mAh versus 2100mAh, in hours

The Miyoo Mini Plus carries a 3000mAh battery and returns roughly 4–5 hours of play — pushing toward six on light 8-bit systems, settling around four to five on PS1. The base RG35XX carries a smaller 2100mAh cell and lands near three hours. That is not a rounding error; it is the difference between a device that survives a transatlantic leg and one that needs a top-up before lunch. The A7's efficiency is doing quiet work here — the same architectural trait that costs the Miyoo a few frames on heavy GBA buys it the longest unplugged sessions in the matchup.

USB-C versus micro-USB

The Miyoo charges and transfers data over modern USB-C; the base RG35XX still uses micro-USB. In 2026 this is no longer a minor gripe — it is a real annoyance, the difference between grabbing whatever cable is nearest and digging through a drawer for the one connector you own that goes in only one way and you will guess wrong the first two attempts. For a device you carry, port modernity is a quality-of-life feature, and the Miyoo simply has the better one.

Wi-Fi's hidden battery cost

One honest caveat against the Miyoo: that Wi-Fi radio is not free. Leaving it enabled for RetroAchievements or netplay draws current, and the 4–5 hour figure assumes sane use, not a constant connection. The RG35XX has no radio to drain, so its three hours is its three hours regardless. And the successor flips the whole category: the RG35XX Plus ships a 3300mAh battery rated up to 8 hours, beating both base devices outright. If endurance is the hill you are buying on, the Plus quietly takes the flag the base RG35XX surrendered.

Build, Buttons & Pockets

Both are good. They are good in different shapes, and the shape decides who reaches for it.

The shape of each

The RG35XX is the taller device, with a larger chin below the screen and flared, more pronounced shoulder buttons — a silhouette that nods at a Game Boy and fills a larger hand more naturally. The Miyoo Mini Plus is slightly thicker front-to-back but smaller in overall footprint, which makes it the genuinely more pocketable of the two. On the in-hand quality, the Lemmy reviewer was unambiguous: “The Miyoo Mini Plus feels notably more premium with only a slight button rattle and a nice weight to size ratio that makes it feel very solid,” landing on the summary that “the Miyoo Mini Plus is undoubtedly the nicer device in my mind. It looks and feels way more premium.” That is the consensus: the Miyoo is the jewel; the RG35XX is the workhorse.

D-pad and shoulder buttons

The RG35XX's larger body buys it more generous, flared shoulder buttons that some players find easier to hit reliably, and a chin that gives the thumbs somewhere to rest. The Miyoo's controls are tighter and, by most accounts, a touch more springy and precise — excellent for 2D fighting and platforming, slightly cramped for hands at the larger end of the bell curve. Neither has analog sticks worth planning around, which is fine, because neither is the device you want for the 3D systems that need them.

Storage: one slot versus two

A quiet but real win for Anbernic: the RG35XX has dual microSD slots, one typically reserved for the firmware and one for your ROM library, which simplifies backups and lets you swap entire collections without disturbing the OS. The Miyoo Mini Plus runs from a single microSD, capping total expandable storage and meaning your firmware and games share a card. For a small library it is a non-issue; for a hoarder with a four-system everything-set, the second slot is genuinely convenient.

Pricing & What to Buy

The prices are close enough that value, not headline cost, decides this. Here is the 2026 landscape.

The pricing table

Base versus Plus versus the rest of the lineup

The single most important pricing fact in this entire comparison: the RG35XX Plus frequently sells for about the same money as the base RG35XX, sometimes less than the Miyoo. Retro Dodo reviewed the Plus at $65 and called it “a device that I find hard to hate, at just $65 it's positioned competitively against many other devices on the market,” naming it “one of the best handhelds they have released all year.” When the more capable model costs the same as the less capable one, the base RG35XX stops making sense for new buyers. DROIX's DaveC drew the line for existing owners too: “if you already have an Anbernic RG35XX then it is perhaps not worth the upgrade unless you want faster PS1 and Dreamcast emulation.”

Where to buy, what to avoid

Buy from Anbernic and Miyoo's official storefronts or established retailers, not the cheapest marketplace listing — counterfeit Miyoo units and mislabelled RG35XX revisions both circulate, and a $15 saving is not worth a bricked device or a fake screen. Confirm you are getting the Plus if you want the Plus; the naming across Anbernic's catalogue (35XX, 35XX Plus, 35XX H, 35XX SP, 35XX Pro) is a deliberate fog, and listings exploit it. Match the battery and CPU on the product page to the spec table above before you check out.

Five People, Five Answers

There is no universal winner because there is no universal buyer. Here are the five real ones, and the device each should actually purchase.

The commuter and the pocket purist

Buy the Miyoo Mini Plus. If the device lives in a coat pocket and comes out on a train, the smaller footprint, the longer 4–5 hour battery, the USB-C port and the instant-resume Game Switcher are decisive. You are playing 8- and 16-bit libraries where the Miyoo's optimization shines and its hardware never strains. This is the Miyoo's home turf and it wins walking.

The couch and TV player

Buy an RG35XX — ideally the Plus. The Miyoo has no video output and never will; the moment your use case includes 'and sometimes I want it on the television,' the comparison is over. HDMI plus GarlicOS turns the Anbernic into a pocket console that doubles as a set-top box, and the Plus's GPU means the big-screen image is driving content the Miyoo could not render at all.

The tinkerer and the netplay host

Buy the Miyoo Mini Plus. Wi-Fi with SSH access is catnip for the kind of user who wants to shell into their handheld, script their library, and host an online netplay session of Street Fighter II. The base RG35XX, with no radio, cannot play this game at all. RetroAchievements hunters fall in this bucket too — the Miyoo syncs them; the base Anbernic does not.

The kid and the accident-prone

Buy the RG35XX. The Lemmy reviewer's framing is the right one: “The RG35xx is a better handheld for children and the accident prone... The Miyoo Mini Plus is better for people who want a premium experience and RetroAchievements.” The Anbernic is the cheaper thing to drop, lose, or hand to a seven-year-old, and dual SD cards make it trivial to restore after the inevitable disaster.

The Dreamcast and DS hopeful

Buy the RG35XX Plus, and only the Plus. Neither base device touches Dreamcast or Nintendo DS with any reliability. The Plus, with its H700, 1GB of LPDDR4 and real GPU, runs the bulk of the Dreamcast catalogue at full speed and makes DS genuinely usable if you tolerate dual-screen layout swapping. If this is your ceiling, the base models are a waste of money and the Miyoo is a non-starter.

Switching One to the Other

You bought one, you regret it, or you want to run both and keep your progress in sync. Here is how to move without losing saves.

Moving from Miyoo to RG35XX

The good news is that your battery saves are portable and your freeze states are not. Both devices run libretro cores under the hood, so a .srm file — the in-game battery save that Pokémon or The Legend of Zelda writes — will be read correctly by the matching core on either machine. A .state save-state, the instant freeze of the entire emulator, is bound to the exact core build and emulator version it was created on, and will usually fail or corrupt if you move it across firmwares. The rule: migrate .srm, abandon .state, and reach a natural in-game save point before you switch cards.

Moving from RG35XX to Miyoo

Same logic in reverse, with one extra wrinkle: OnionOS stores saves inside a profile directory, so you cannot simply dump files into the root of the card. Pull your .srm files off the GarlicOS card, then drop them into the matching core folder beneath the Miyoo's profile path. Rescan, and your battery saves resume cleanly. RetroAchievements progress lives server-side once the Miyoo syncs over Wi-Fi, so that part migrates for free the first time you connect.

The save-file map, step by step

# OnionOS (Miyoo) save layout on the microSD:
/mnt/SDCARD/Saves/CurrentProfile/saves//.srm
/mnt/SDCARD/Saves/CurrentProfile/states//.state

# GarlicOS (RG35XX) save layout:
/Roms//.srm
/Saves//.state

# 1. Back up the source card to your PC, then pull only the battery saves:
cp -R /Volumes/MIYOO/Saves/CurrentProfile/saves/  ~/retro-srm/

# 2. .srm files are core-portable (libretro reads them on either device).
#    .state freeze-states are NOT - they are tied to the exact core build.
#    Reach an in-game save point BEFORE migrating, then ignore the .state files.

# 3. Drop the .srm into the matching destination system folder and rescan:
cp ~/retro-srm/gba/*.srm  /Volumes/GARLIC/Roms/GBA/

# 4. Reverse direction (RG35XX -> Miyoo): place files UNDER the profile path,
#    not at the card root, or OnionOS will not see them.
cp /Volumes/GARLIC/Saves/GBA/*.srm  /Volumes/MIYOO/Saves/CurrentProfile/saves/gba/

Keep a dated backup folder of the whole Saves tree before you start. Card corruption is the most common way people lose a decade of progress, and it is entirely preventable with one cp -R.

The Verdict

Two devices, two philosophies, and — this is the part the 'which is better' threads refuse to accept — two correct answers depending on who is asking.

Miyoo Mini Plus: pros and cons

Anbernic RG35XX: pros and cons

The Machine's call

For the majority of buyers — people whose libraries top out at the Game Boy Advance and PlayStation, who carry the device, who value the moment-to-moment experience over the spec sheet — the Miyoo Mini Plus is the better handheld. OnionOS, the longer battery, the Wi-Fi feature set and USB-C combine into a device that is simply nicer to live with, and no amount of extra RAM on the base RG35XX overturns that. The community calling it the more premium object is not wrong.

But the comparison no longer ends there, and intellectual honesty demands the second half. The RG35XX Plus has changed the question. At roughly the same price as everything else here, it delivers capabilities — Dreamcast at near-full-speed, Nintendo DS, an 8-hour battery, HDMI, Bluetooth — that the Miyoo cannot reach at any setting. TechReviewsUK's René R. put the Anbernic philosophy in one line: “The Anbernic RG35XX Plus proves that raw power is the ultimate feature.” That is the case for the other side, and it is a strong one.

So the data-backed recommendation, stated plainly: if you want the best experience and you will live in the 8-to-32-bit era, buy the Miyoo Mini Plus and never look back. If you want the most capability per dollar, plan to drive a TV, or harbour any Dreamcast ambitions, skip the base RG35XX entirely and buy the RG35XX Plus. The base RG35XX, caught between a more lovable rival below it and its own superior successor above it at the same price, is the one device in this comparison with no obvious buyer left in 2026. Choose a philosophy, not a brand — and if your real answer is 'I want everything,' that is not a handheld in this class at all.