Miyoo Mini vs Mini Plus 2026: 1 SoC, 2 Screens, $63

Every few months someone new discovers the Miyoo Mini, falls hard for it, and then asks the internet the same question: Mini or Mini Plus? The question sounds like a spec war. It is not. Both machines are built on the exact same processor, the same quantity of memory, and the same 2D-only graphics block. Whatever you have read about the Plus being the upgraded model, the silicon did not get the memo. It runs Symphony of the Night at the same frame rate on both.

So this is not really a performance comparison, because there is nothing to compare. It is a screen-size and battery decision wearing a spec sheet's clothing, complicated by one annoying fact of 2026: the original Mini is mostly discontinued, and the Plus is the one actually sitting in stock. That changes the math more than any benchmark would. Let's take the whole thing apart, starting with the part every marketing page carefully skips: the chip.

The Same Silicon, Twice

The SSD202D, Unpacked

Both the original Miyoo Mini and the Miyoo Mini Plus run a SigmaStar SSD202D. It is a dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 clocked at 1.2GHz, paired with 128MB of DDR3 memory and a 16MB SPI ROM. This is not a gaming chip. SigmaStar designed the SSD202D for smart displays, IP cameras, and industrial control panels, the little touchscreens on a coffee machine or a video doorbell. Somebody at Miyoo looked at an appliance controller and decided it could run PlayStation, and the genuinely remarkable thing is that they were mostly right.

The provenance is documented, not marketing. CNX Software covered the original Miyoo Mini and its SSD202D internals back on December 3, 2021, when the device first launched. The Plus arrived roughly two years later, in 2023, on the same part. Two years is an eternity in mobile silicon. Miyoo shipped the sequel on identical hardware. That single fact tells you exactly how much of the Plus is a new device and how much is a new shell.

Why "Plus" Doesn't Mean "Faster"

Marketing loves a "Plus." It implies more cores, more clock, more headroom. Here it implies none of those. The Mini Plus has the same two Cortex-A7 cores at the same 1.2GHz, the same 128MB of DDR3, and the same missing 3D pipeline as the original. Every emulator that runs on one runs identically on the other, because they are executing the same instructions on the same transistors. If a PlayStation game drops frames in a busy scene on the original Mini, it drops the same frames in the same scene on the Plus. There is no secret performance mode hiding in the larger chassis, no thermal headroom being unlocked, no clock bump. Same silicon, same result.

This matters because the forums are full of people who bought the Plus expecting it to run Nintendo 64 or Dreamcast because it is newer. It is not newer in any way that counts. DROIX, reviewing the platform, is blunt about the constraint: the Miyoo only has 128MB RAM, but in most cases this is all you need. All you need, that is, for the systems the chip can actually handle. Ask it for more and the RAM wall and the absent GPU answer you in unison, and the answer is no.

The 2D-Only GPU Nobody Advertises

The single most important spec on both devices is the one no storefront prints: the SSD202D has no 3D graphics acceleration. Its graphics block is a 2D compositor, the sort of thing that draws menus and video overlays on an appliance screen. Everything you see rendered in 3D on this handheld, every polygon in a PS1 game, is being computed in software on those two little CPU cores. That is why the PlayStation ceiling is a hard ceiling and not a soft suggestion. Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, and PSP are 3D-native platforms whose emulators expect a real GPU to lean on. Take the GPU away and you are asking two 1.2GHz cores to impersonate a graphics card. They decline, politely, by turning the game into a slideshow.

Understanding this one fact resolves about ninety percent of the arguments people have about these two machines. The Plus did not raise the ceiling. It repainted the room underneath it. If you want to know precisely where that ceiling sits and which PlayStation games flirt with it, we mapped the whole thing in our look at the Mini Plus PlayStation ceiling. The short version: the ceiling is real, it is shared, and no amount of Plus fixes it.

Spec Sheet: Mini vs Mini Plus

The Full Comparison Table

Here is the entire argument in one grid. Read down the two right-hand columns and notice how much of it is copy-paste. The rows that differ are the rows that matter, and there are far fewer of them than the price gap and the marketing would have you believe.

Reading the Table: What's Identical

SoC, CPU, RAM, GPU, resolution, charging port, the absence of Bluetooth, the absence of HDMI, the absence of analog sticks, the absence of any local link cable or multiplayer, the community firmware, and the emulation ceiling. That is the overwhelming bulk of the specification, and it is shared right down to the part number. When two products are this close, the lazy verdict is to declare them "basically the same." They are, in every single dimension except the two your hands and your eyes actually make contact with.

Reading the Table: What Diverges

Four hardware rows carry the entire real difference: screen size (2.8 versus 3.5 inches), battery capacity (1900 or 2000mAh versus 3000mAh), wireless (none versus 2.4GHz Wi-Fi), and weight (~110g versus ~121g). Then add a fifth, non-hardware row that has quietly become the most decisive of all in 2026: availability. The original Mini is discontinued and survives on the used market; the Plus is the one you can actually put in a cart today. We will come back to that repeatedly, because it reframes the entire recommendation from a spec debate into a stock-check.

What Actually Changed: Screen and Battery

2.8 vs 3.5 Inches, Same 640 x 480

Both panels are 640 x 480 IPS displays. That is the crucial catch, and it is one most buyers miss: the Plus's larger 3.5-inch screen shows the exact same number of pixels as the original's 2.8-inch screen, just spread across more glass. You do not gain sharpness. You gain size. Pixel density actually drops on the Plus, which for tight pixel-art systems from the 8-bit and 16-bit era is a wash, or a mild aesthetic loss for purists who like their pixels dense. For readability, menu text, and anyone over forty squinting at a Game Boy RPG at arm's length, the bigger panel is a genuine comfort upgrade. It is, by a wide margin, the single most-cited reason buyers pick the Plus.

Both screens are 4:3, and both are laminated on the current models. The original's lamination arrived only with the V2 revision; V1 buyers got an air gap between glass and panel that makes the image look very slightly deeper-set. The Plus's panel is the same display technology stretched, not a better technology introduced. Frame it that way and you calibrate your expectations correctly: this is an ergonomics change, a comfort change, not an image-quality leap. Nobody is getting a sharper Chrono Trigger. They are getting a bigger one.

1900/2000mAh vs 3000mAh

The battery is the Plus's most defensible improvement, the one upgrade that survives scrutiny. The original Mini shipped with a 1900mAh cell in the V1 and 2000mAh in the V2. The Plus carries 3000mAh, a fifty-percent bump, and because the SSD202D genuinely sips power, that extra capacity translates into real, felt endurance. Playhouse, in its review, logged 6 to 8 hours of mixed use with the screen at 50% brightness on the Plus. The original, with a third less capacity driving a smaller but similarly efficient screen, lands materially shorter in the same conditions. Nobody buys a Miyoo for its battery life, but if you are the sort of person who forgets to charge things, the Plus forgives you for longer.

There is a subtle interaction worth naming out loud. The Plus's Wi-Fi radio, when left switched on, eats into that battery advantage. Turn it off between sync sessions and the 3000mAh cell does its best work. Leave it constantly hunting for a network it cannot find and you hand some of the gain straight back. Endurance on the Plus is partly a settings decision, not just a hardware one.

The Wi-Fi Question

The Plus adds exactly one radio the original never had: 2.4GHz Wi-Fi. No Bluetooth, no 5GHz band, no HDMI, just basic 2.4GHz wireless. On paper it reads modest. In practice it is the feature that most changes how you actually live with the device. Wi-Fi is what lets OnionOS scrape box art, sync the system clock, pull over-the-air firmware updates, and run RetroArch netplay against a friend. On the original Mini, every one of those tasks means physically ejecting the microSD card and sitting down at a computer. The Plus lets you do all of them from the couch, from bed, from anywhere. Whether that convenience is worth the price premium depends entirely on how much you personally enjoy extracting tiny memory cards with a fingernail.

The PS1 Ceiling Both Devices Share

What Runs Full Speed

Inside the ceiling, both machines are excellent, and they are excellent in precisely the same way. The full-speed roster includes NES, SNES, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, Sega Master System, Genesis and Mega Drive, PC Engine and TurboGrafx-16, Neo Geo on the MVS side, WonderSwan, and the CPS-1 and CPS-2 arcade libraries via FBNeo and MAME2003-Plus. Then the crown jewel: Sony PlayStation. PS1 is simultaneously the best thing these handhelds do and the exact spot where the chip starts to perspire. 2D-heavy PS1 titles like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night run beautifully, the sweet spot of 2D artistry on 32-bit hardware. Polygon-heavy 3D showcases like Final Fantasy VII will politely show you the ceiling in their busier pre-rendered-to-realtime transitions.

What Doesn't: N64, Dreamcast, PSP

Above PlayStation, the wheels come off, on both devices, for the same architectural reason. Playhouse states the ceiling plainly in its review: N64 and Dreamcast are hit-and-miss. PSP is not recommended. Handheld Picker frames the device's whole remit as 8-bit, 16-bit, arcade, and PlayStation 1 gaming, and that list is not modest by accident; it is the honest edge of the silicon, printed as a feature. Any storefront selling you a Mini or Mini Plus preloaded with N64 or PSP "support" is selling you folders full of unplayable slideshows. If your heart is genuinely set on Mario 64 or God of War at playable speeds, you are shopping in the wrong tier entirely, and we cover exactly where to go instead in our breakdown of the Retroid Pocket upgrade tax.

Benchmarks From the Community

Because the silicon is shared, there is no A-versus-B frame-rate benchmark to run here; the only variable that moves between models is battery life. That reframes "benchmarks" for this comparison as playability reports, and the community's reports are strikingly consistent across independent sources. Retro Handheld HQ calls the Plus the most polished sub-$70 emulation handheld you can buy in 2026. RetroResolve, reviewing the line, concludes that for the price, I'll happily admit the Miyoo Mini is easily the best budget handheld available. DROIX, comparing it directly against a faster Allwinner rival, concedes that the beefier chip runs faster than the Miyoo processor but still lands on the Miyoo for its size and its firmware. Three outlets, three angles, one verdict: within its lane, this thing is superb, and the lane is exactly the same width on both models. If you want cycle-accurate rather than good-enough, that is a genuinely different hobby, and it lives on the MiSTer FPGA side of the fence, at several times the price.

OnionOS Matters More Than the Hardware

Stock Firmware vs OnionOS

Out of the box, both devices run Miyoo's stock firmware, which is functional and entirely forgettable. The reason anyone still talks about these handhelds in 2026, four years after the original launched, is the community firmware, and specifically OnionOS. It is barely an exaggeration to say OnionOS is the actual product and the hardware is just the delivery mechanism. Retro Handheld HQ says it directly: OnionOS transforms this device and is the single biggest reason this handheld stays relevant in 2026. The Handheld Gaming Community reviewers agree, noting that it elevates the user experience to a level far beyond the stock firmware.

OnionOS runs on both the original Mini and the Plus, which is another quiet point in favor of treating them as one platform. The original just needs a base firmware new enough to accept it; builds tagged 202305052130 and later are the safe floor, and the current stable line is OnionOS v4.2.3. Install it once and the machine stops feeling like a $60 gadget from a marketplace and starts feeling like a tiny, purpose-built console that someone loved.

What OnionOS Adds

OnionOS ships its own build of RetroArch, per the OnionUI documentation, with a custom display driver made for maximum precision and performance, plus over 100 emulator cores, automatic save-and-resume, box-art scraping, per-game button remapping, shader support, and a genuinely pleasant interface that respects the 4:3 screen. Games live under a /Roms directory with per-system folders (FC, SFC, MD, GB, GBC, GBA, PCE, NEOGEO, ARCADE, PS, WS, and more), while a separate /BIOS folder holds the system files certain cores need. It is tidy, thoroughly documented, and free. The whole project lives out in the open on GitHub, which is more transparency than you get from most things in this corner of the hobby.

Netplay, Box Art, and the Wi-Fi Payoff

Here is where the two devices finally, genuinely diverge on the software side. The OnionOS features that depend on Wi-Fi, box-art scraping over the network, clock synchronization, over-the-air updates, and RetroArch netplay, are all first-class citizens on the Plus and manual-only chores on the original Mini. The original can still technically do every one of them; you simply do the network half on a computer and copy the results onto the card by hand. The Plus does it in place, on the device, over the air. This is the one respect in which the Plus's hardware genuinely unlocks software the original cannot match on its own, and it comes down entirely to that single, unglamorous 2.4GHz radio.

Pricing and Availability in 2026

The Mini Plus Price Map

Miyoo pricing is chaos, and in 2026 the chaos is half the story. The identical device shows up at wildly different numbers depending on the seller, the region, and whether a microSD card stuffed with ROMs is bundled in. The official Miyoo site listed the Plus at $62.99 in late 2025. During a store sale window running May 1 to 5, 2026, the 64GB color variants dropped to $56.99 against a $79.99 regular price. A separate 2026 hands-on review pegged it at $65.99; a late-2025 reseller undercut everyone at $53.99; and a price tracker put the all-time low near $49.50 with a late-2025 average around $51.49. Then Europe happens. One 2026 marketplace listing showed the Plus at EUR 159.00 plus EUR 9.39 shipping against a frankly fictional "recommended" price of EUR 259.00, while a 2025 bundle storefront advertised "25,000 games included" for EUR 109.90 versus a EUR 149.00 regular.

The honest target for a bare Plus in 2026 is roughly $55 to $65, or about GBP 55 to 60. Anything much above that is a shipping surcharge or a ROM-bundle tax dressed up as a feature. Anything far below, and here I mean the $25 Amazon listings specifically, is a clone or an outright scam wearing the Miyoo name.

The Original Mini: A Used-Market Problem

The original Mini's price is genuinely harder to pin down, for one simple reason: it is largely discontinued as a new product. When you find one, it tends to run about $20 under the Plus, but "when you find one" is doing an enormous amount of work in that sentence. In 2026 the original circulates mostly on the used and collector market: eBay listings, forum sales, the occasional dusty clearance shelf. That $20 saving arrives with no warranty, no fresh battery, no guarantee you are getting the laminated V2 rather than the air-gapped V1, and no recourse if the D-pad is worn. The Plus, by contrast, is stocked more or less everywhere.

The "25,000 Games" Bundle Trap

Watch the bundles carefully, because they are where buyers lose money. The more games a listing brags about, the more it charges and the less that number actually means. Storefronts advertising "25,000 games" or "28,000 games" are describing padded ROM sets, heavy with duplicates, bad dumps, regional variants, and whole folders for systems the chip physically cannot run. Miyoo's own official firmware ships completely empty. We took a tape measure to those inflated libraries in our piece on the Mini Plus bundled game-list numbers, and the short version is unambiguous: buy the bare device, wipe the card, and build your own list. The big number is a browsing tax, not a feature, and it is identical whether you buy the Mini or the Plus.

Who Each One Is For

Five Buyers, Five Answers

Because the raw performance is identical, the "right" model is entirely a function of how and where you play, not what you play. Here are the scenarios that actually decide it.

• The everyday-carry minimalist. You want the smallest possible object that plays SNES on a train platform. The original Mini wins outright: ~110g, genuinely pocketable, the closest thing the hobby has to a playable keychain. If you can find one in good shape, this is its remaining reason to exist in 2026.
• The nightstand and couch player. You play in bed or on the sofa, and readability comfortably beats pocketability. The Plus, every single time: the 3.5-inch screen and the 3000mAh battery were built for exactly this posture.
• The commuter. Long days away from a charger, and you like your box art to simply be there. The Plus: the bigger battery survives the round trip, and Wi-Fi keeps the library tidy and scraped without a laptop in the loop.
• The collector. You want the original, the first of the line, the little machine that started the entire craze. The original Mini, ideally a laminated V2, is the object of desire here. You are buying history and provenance, not ergonomics.
• The gift-giver or first-timer. You want something that is in stock, supported, and hard to get wrong. The Plus: it is the one you can actually order today, running the firmware that every guide on the internet is written for.

The Households These Don't Fit

Two kinds of buyer should walk away from both devices entirely. If you want local multiplayer, link-cable Pokemon trading, two-player Bomberman on one couch, neither device offers it: there is no link cable, no local wireless multiplayer, only online RetroArch netplay over Wi-Fi on the Plus. And if you want anything above the PS1 line, meaning Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, PSP, or DS at playable speeds, both machines will disappoint you in exactly the same measure. That is a Retroid or a more powerful Android handheld conversation, and if you are weighing genuinely modern options the Retroid Pocket 6 versus G2 comparison is the better place to start than either Miyoo.

The Sentiment Data

For a gut check, the buyer reviews are lopsidedly positive within the device's lane. One 2025 review called the Plus one of the best entry-level retro handhelds and documented a 4.4 out of 5 rating across 173 customers, a healthy sample rather than a handful of cherry-picked stars. Playhouse scored it 4.5 out of 5 and called it the sweet spot for sub-GBP 100 retro handhelds in 2026. A GamesRadar reviewer, thoroughly won over, wrote that I used to insist nothing beat the real deal, but now nothing beats curling up with Miyoo Mini Plus handheld and my favorite retro games. People who buy this thing, overwhelmingly, keep it and love it. The complaints, when they come, are almost never about the model choice; they are about the ceiling both models share.

Migrating From Mini to Mini Plus

Before You Switch: Back Up the Card

Say you already own the original Mini and you have decided to move up to the Plus for the screen and the battery. Good news: because both machines run OnionOS with the same folder conventions, your entire library, your saves, and your save states are portable. You are not starting over from a blank card. You are copying three folders and rebuilding one firmware install. The cardinal rule here is the same as any migration you will ever do: back up first, and verify the backup actually opened before you so much as touch the source card.

Mount the original Mini's microSD card on a computer. You are after three things above all else: your in-game battery saves, your RetroArch save states, and any BIOS files you added over time. Everything else, the ROMs and OnionOS itself, can be re-downloaded if disaster strikes. Your saves cannot. There is no cloud backup here, no account syncing your hundred hours of Final Fantasy. The card is the only copy until you make a second one.

The Backup-and-Restore Sequence

The whole migration is a handful of copy operations plus one clean OnionOS install on the Plus's card. Resist the urge to simply clone the old card byte-for-byte onto the new one; a fresh OnionOS build made for the Plus avoids version drift and half-broken configs carried over from an older install. Copy your data on top of a clean install instead, in this order.

Step 1. Insert the ORIGINAL Mini's SD card into your computer.

Step 2. Copy these folders to a safe backup location:

    /Saves     <- in-game (battery) saves
    /States    <- RetroArch save states
    /BIOS      <- system BIOS files you added
    /Roms      <- optional: your ROM library + folder tags
                  (FC, SFC, MD, GB, GBC, GBA, PCE,
                   NEOGEO, ARCADE, PS, WS, ...)

Step 3. On a FRESH card for the Plus, install OnionOS
        (stable v4.2.3) per the OnionUI instructions.

Step 4. Boot the Plus once to let OnionOS finish first-run
        setup, then power off and re-mount the new card.

Step 5. Copy your backed-up /Saves and /States back onto the
        new card, keeping the folder names identical.

Step 6. Copy /BIOS and your /Roms back into place.

Step 7. Re-insert, boot the Plus, and confirm a few saves
        actually load before trusting it.

Step 8. ONLY now, reformat or retire the original card.

What Carries Over, What Doesn't

Saves, states, ROMs, and BIOS files carry over cleanly; the folder tags are identical between the two models, so RetroArch finds everything precisely where it expects to. What does not carry over is anything screen-specific. Shader presets you tuned for the 2.8-inch panel may look slightly different stretched across the 3.5-inch one, and you will probably want to re-scrape box art now that Wi-Fi turns it into a one-tap job on the Plus. Per-game button maps transfer fine, but re-check any you set up from muscle memory. Budget about twenty minutes for the whole exercise, most of it spent watching a progress bar crawl through a file copy rather than doing anything clever.

Pros and Cons, Side by Side

Original Miyoo Mini: The Ledger

The original is a specialist now: smallest, cheapest when you can find it, and increasingly a collector's piece rather than a daily driver. The ledger reflects a device that has aged into a niche.

Miyoo Mini Plus: The Ledger

The Plus is the generalist and, in 2026, the sensible default. It trades a small amount of pocketability for a large amount of day-to-day livability, and it has the one thing the original increasingly lacks: a place to buy it.

The Tie-Breakers

When the two ledgers are this close, three factors break the tie. First, availability: you can buy a Plus new today, whereas the original is a scavenger hunt with variable loot. Second, Wi-Fi: if syncing, scraping, and netplay matter to you at all, the Plus is the only one that does them without a computer in the room. Third, your eyes: if a 2.8-inch screen already feels cramped when you hold it, the extra 0.7 inch is not a luxury, it is the entire point of the exercise. Everything else, the part that actually plays the games, is a deliberate tie.

The Verdict

If You're Buying New in 2026

Buy the Plus. This is not a close call, and it is emphatically not because the Plus is faster, because it is not faster by a single clock cycle. It is because the original Mini is discontinued, and the Plus is the model with stock, with support, with the bigger screen, the bigger battery, and the Wi-Fi that makes OnionOS a pleasure rather than a chore. At a real-world $55 to $65, it is, as Handheld Picker puts it, one of the easiest retro handhelds to recommend in 2026 because it knows exactly what it is: a tiny, inexpensive, vertical Linux handheld for 8-bit, 16-bit, arcade, and PlayStation 1 gaming. That is the entire pitch, delivered honestly, with no ceiling oversold.

If You Already Own a Mini

Keep it. If you own an original Mini, especially a laminated V2, and you are content with the screen size, there is no performance reason on earth to upgrade, because there is no performance difference to chase. Upgrade only if you specifically and personally want the bigger screen, the longer battery, or the on-device Wi-Fi. Those are real, tangible, quality-of-life gains that you will feel every session. They are not a spec-sheet revolution, and no reviewer should sell them to you as one. Spend the $60 on the thing you will actually feel in your hands, not the thing a marketing page told you to want.

The One-Sentence Answer

The Miyoo Mini and the Mini Plus are the same computer housed in two different bodies: pick the original if you value the smallest possible object above all else and can actually find one, and pick the Plus, which is what most people should do, if you want the version that is still made, still supported, and simply easier to look at. Handheld Picker's coda fits both machines perfectly: in 2026 the Plus is no longer the strongest budget handheld. It is still one of the nicest small ones. The chip was never the reason to buy a Miyoo, on either model. It still isn't.