Retroid Pocket 5 vs 6 (2026): 8 Gen 2 at a $35 Premium

Retroid has settled into a release cadence that would make a Swiss watchmaker nervous. Every year to eighteen months a new Pocket lands, the spec sheet climbs exactly one rung, the forums relitigate the same argument, and a few thousand people who already own a perfectly serviceable handheld start eyeing the checkout button anyway. The Retroid Pocket 5 and the Retroid Pocket 6 are the two live sides of that argument right now. One runs a Snapdragon 865, the silicon that sat inside 2020's flagship Android phones. The other runs a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, the silicon that sat inside 2023's. In phone terms that is three years and two full nodes of process shrink. In handheld-emulation terms it is roughly the difference between a device that plays almost everything and a device that plays almost everything with the fan off.

This is a review of both machines held against each other, because that is the only honest way to review either. Nobody cross-shops a Pocket 6 against a toaster. They cross-shop it against the cheaper Pocket that does most of the same job, and they stand there doing arithmetic. So that is what this is: the arithmetic, shown in full, with named sources, measured benchmarks, and a verdict that refuses to pretend the more expensive machine automatically wins.

The Generation Gap

The catch, and the reason this comparison is interesting rather than a foregone conclusion, is that the gap between these two costs about thirty-five dollars. As of this writing the Pocket 5 sits at $209 in its base configuration and the Pocket 6 at $244. That is not a chasm. It is roughly the price of a single full-price cartridge from a console neither device can legally be sold pre-loaded with. So the question was never which one is faster. The 6 is faster, comfortably, on every axis that shows up in a benchmark. The question is whether faster is the same thing as better for the specific, slightly obsessive task these machines exist to perform, which is running other companies' decades-old code on a screen the size of a sandwich.

The one-sentence version

If you never intend to touch anything more demanding than a Dreamcast, a PSP, or a well-behaved GameCube library, the Pocket 5 already does the entire job and the 6 is a luxury. If you want the demanding half of the PlayStation 2 catalogue, the fussier corners of Saturn, and whatever the post-Yuzu Switch scene manages to keep alive this month, the Pocket 6's extra silicon stops being a luxury and becomes the reason the games hold sixty frames. Everything past this sentence is me showing my work.

What actually changed

Strip away the marketing and the generational leap comes down to four things: a much stronger GPU, a 120Hz panel where the 5 ran 60Hz, a bigger 6,000mAh battery with 27W charging, and an active cooling fan bolted in behind all of it. RAM tops out higher, since a 12GB option exists on the 6, and the wireless stack jumps to Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.3. None of that is revolutionary in isolation. Stacked together it produces a machine that is meaningfully more capable at exactly the tier where the 5 begins to sweat, and functionally identical everywhere below it.

Who this comparison is for

This is for the person standing in front of two Retroid listings with a full cart and a nagging sense that the cheaper one is a trap and the pricier one is also a trap, unsure which trap is which. It is not an on-ramp for someone who has never owned an Android handheld; for that, start with the price you can stomach and the games you actually own, then come back. And it is emphatically not for the person who wants a single number to make the decision for them. There are two numbers here, they are 8.5 and 8.0, and the entire point of the piece is that the lower one belongs to the better device.

The Spec Sheet

Before the essay, the table. A spec sheet is not an argument; it is the raw material an argument gets built out of. But it is the fastest way to see where these two machines diverge and, just as usefully, where they refuse to. A striking amount of the Pocket 5 and Pocket 6 is identical: same 1080p AMOLED class of panel, same 128GB of base UFS storage, same Android 13 underneath, same hall-effect sticks, same fundamental shape in the hand. The 6 is an evolution of a good design, not a repudiation of it.

Where the sources disagree with themselves

Three rows in that table earn a footnote, because the specification sheets cannot keep their story straight. The widely-cited Gadgeteer-adjacent comparison tables that circulated in April 2026 list the Pocket 5's panel as a 5.0-inch display, the Pocket 6's storage as UFS 4.0, and its OS as Android 14. Retroid's own product page and Retrododo's March 2026 hands-on both describe the 6 as UFS 3.1 running Android 13, and every Pocket 5 listing and review I have seen, including our own time with the device, puts its panel in the same 5.5-inch class as the 6, not a half-inch smaller. When one aggregator disagrees with the manufacturer and every reviewer simultaneously, the aggregator is usually the typo. I have gone with the manufacturer figures and flagged the outliers in the table rather than launder them into fact.

The rows that matter, ranked

If you read only four lines of that table, read these: the SoC, the GPU, the refresh rate, and the price. Everything else is either shared outright or a second-order consequence of those four. The bigger battery is there partly to feed the hungrier chip. The fan is there because that chip sheds heat the passive 5 never had to. The analog triggers and the Wi-Fi 7 are pleasant, and nobody in the history of the hobby has bought a retro handheld for its Bluetooth revision.

What the table cannot show you

A spec sheet is silent on the two things that actually decide whether you keep a handheld or resell it in a month: how the software feels and how the thing sits in your palms after ninety minutes. Both of these are Android devices with all the front-end fiddliness that implies, and both share Retroid's mature ergonomics. The table will tell you the 6 is 27 grams heavier and a few millimetres larger in every direction. It will not tell you that you stop noticing within an afternoon. Hold that thought for the ergonomics section.

The Silicon: 865 vs 8 Gen 2

This is the section the entire price gap is defending, so it gets the most ink. Everything else on these two machines is a supporting actor to the chip.

Two flagships, three years apart

The Snapdragon 865 was Qualcomm's 2020 champion, a 7nm-class part with an Adreno 650 GPU that powered a generation of Galaxy and OnePlus flagships. It is not slow. It was, for its year, the fastest Android silicon money could buy, and half a decade later it still runs the vast bulk of the emulation canon without complaint. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is the 2023 champion, a 4nm-class part with the Adreno 740. The generational distance between them is not marketing. It is three years of TSMC process improvements, a wider and more efficient CPU cluster, and a GPU that belongs to a different era of mobile graphics. Notebookcheck framed the move from the 865 to the 8 Gen 2 as the single headline reason to consider the 6 at all, and they are right to. Take away the chip and the 6 is a 5 with a fan and a smoother menu.

The benchmark numbers, and what they hide

Numbers help here, and there are good ones. In DROIX's direct head-to-head, run by reviewer DaveC, the Pocket 6 posts roughly +64.7% in Geekbench 5 single-core, +59.7% in multi-core, +82.7% in AnTuTu, and a startling +189.2% in 3DMark Wild Life Extreme over the Pocket 5. Hold those four figures up to the light and one of them is not like the others. The CPU deltas sit in a believable sixty-to-eighty-percent band. The GPU delta, that Wild Life Extreme figure, nearly triples. That is the number the whole $35 argument is quietly built on, because the demanding half of console emulation is a graphics problem long before it is a processor problem.

Why the GPU gap is the whole story

Here is the mechanism, stripped of jargon. Emulating a console at its native resolution leans hardest on the CPU, which has to translate the original hardware's instructions in real time. Emulating a console at an upscaled resolution, say rendering a PlayStation 2 game at a crisp 1080p instead of its muddy original 480i, leans hardest on the GPU, which has to draw far more pixels than the original console ever did. The Adreno 650 in the 5 is perfectly capable of running most of these games at native resolution. The Adreno 740 in the 6 is what lets you turn the resolution up and keep the frame rate pinned. DaveC's verdict on the 6 was blunt and specific: testing PS2, he reported that his team upscaled to 1080p and, in his words, achieved a full 60 FPS. That sentence is the Pocket 6 in miniature. It is not that the 5 cannot run the game. It is that the 6 runs it beautifully.

The Panel

Both machines put a 5.5-inch, 1920x1080 AMOLED in front of your face. This is one of the areas where Retroid's aggregators actively muddy the water, listing the 6 variously at 1920x1080 and at a phone-shaped 1080x2400, and the 5 at a diameter it does not have. Cut through it and the reality is simpler than the tables suggest: two same-size 1080p AMOLED panels, differing in one meaningful spec.

Same size, double the refresh

That one meaningful spec is refresh rate. The 6 runs at 120Hz; the 5 runs at 60Hz. AMOLED gives both of them the deep blacks and punchy, slightly oversaturated colour that flatters old sprite art and CRT-era palettes, and both are genuinely lovely to look at. The 120Hz panel makes the Android front-end feel like a modern phone, makes scrolling through a three-thousand-game library feel frictionless, and gives you headroom for the handful of homebrew and modern indies that actually render above 60fps. It is a real, noticeable quality-of-life upgrade. It is also, for the core purpose of this device, close to irrelevant, and I will not insult you by pretending otherwise.

Resolution, aspect ratio, and the pillarbox tax

A 1080p panel is more resolution than almost any retro content needs, which is exactly the point: it gives you clean integer scaling. A SNES game rendered at 240p slots into a 1080p panel at a tidy multiple with no shimmer. The complication is aspect ratio. Most of the canon, from the NES through the PSP, is 4:3 or thereabouts, and a 16:9 panel pillarboxes it with black bars down the sides. Both of these panels do that identically. Neither device gives you back those side pixels, and no amount of refresh rate changes the geometry. If your library is overwhelmingly 4:3, you are buying a widescreen panel to display a square image on either machine, and that is simply the tax of a modern handheld.

Does 120Hz matter for old games?

Mostly no. The overwhelming majority of what you will run tops out at 60 frames or, for the truly old stuff, 50 or even less. A 120Hz panel cannot invent frames the original game never produced. Where it earns its keep is everywhere that is not the game itself: the launcher, the settings, the store, the web browser you will inevitably use to sideload something. If you value the device feeling like a fluid modern computer between play sessions, the 6's panel is a genuine perk. If you value only the games, the 5's 60Hz panel shows them to you exactly as faithfully.

Body, Battery, and the Fan

The 6 is larger, heavier, and louder than the 5, and every one of those three facts traces back to the same decision: putting a more powerful chip in the same product line and then dealing with the consequences.

Bigger, heavier, and a fan you can hear

The Pocket 6 measures 205.5 by 80.5 by 17.2 millimetres and weighs somewhere around 307 grams; Retroid's own listings put the 5 nearer 199 by 79 by 16 millimetres and roughly 280 grams. On paper that is a meaningful difference. In the hand it is the sort of thing you notice on day one and forget by day three. The louder change is the active cooling fan, which the 5 does without entirely. Under heavy load, running the demanding tier the 6 was built for, that fan spins up and you can hear it. This is not a defect; it is the price of sustained performance, and it is the reason the 6 can hold 60fps in an upscaled PS2 game for an hour without throttling into a slideshow. But if you were expecting a silent slab, adjust your expectations. The 5 stays silent because it never asks its chip to do anything hot enough to need help.

The 6,000mAh math, and the 27W that feeds it

The 6 carries a 6,000mAh battery to the 5's 5,000mAh, a twenty-percent capacity advantage, and it charges at 27W. The instinct is to read twenty percent more battery as twenty percent more play time. Resist it. The 6 is also feeding a hungrier chip, a higher-refresh panel, and a fan, and all three of those draw power the 5 never spends. The practical result is that on light workloads, the eight-bit and sixteen-bit and handheld libraries, the 6's larger cell translates into genuinely longer sessions. On the heavy workloads it was built for, the extra capacity is substantially eaten by the extra draw, and the two devices land closer together than the raw milliamp figures imply. The 27W charging is the quiet win: topping the 6 back up is fast enough that battery anxiety mostly evaporates.

Ergonomics and the sticks

Both machines inherit Retroid's mature control layout, which is to say both are comfortable in a way that shames a lot of pricier competition. The 6 upgrades to 3D hall-effect sticks and, more usefully, to genuinely analog L2 and R2 triggers, which matter for the exact demanding-tier games the chip unlocks: racing games, shooters, anything from the sixth console generation that assumed a pressure-sensitive trigger. The 5's hall sticks are excellent and will not drift, but its shoulder inputs are the more basic affair. If your library leans on analog triggers, that is a real, if narrow, point for the 6 that has nothing to do with the processor.

What Each Machine Runs

Enough theory. The only question that matters is which games run, and how well, on each. The honest way to answer that is in tiers, not fabricated frame counts, because emulation performance is title-by-title and anyone quoting you a single universal FPS number is selling something. Here is the map.

Console tier        Runner / core             Pocket 5 (865)   Pocket 6 (8 Gen 2)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NES / SNES / MD     RetroArch cores           full             full
Game Boy - GBA      RetroArch / standalone    full             full
PS1                 DuckStation               full             full
N64                 Mupen64Plus-FZ            strong           strong
Dreamcast           Flycast                   full             full
PSP                 PPSSPP                    full             full, upscaled
Saturn              Yaba Sanshiro 2           mostly           strong
GameCube            Dolphin                   selective        broad
Wii                 Dolphin                   selective        broader
PS2                 AetherSX2 / fork          a sample         the hard half opens
Switch              post-Yuzu forks           entry titles     more, still selective
Wii U / PS3 / 360   -                         out of reach     out of reach

The shared floor: everything up to Dreamcast and PSP

This is the part people underrate, and it is the part that decides the whole review for most buyers. From the NES up through the PlayStation 1, the Nintendo 64, the Dreamcast, and the PSP, both machines run the library at full speed. Not selectively. Not with caveats. Full speed. The Snapdragon 865 was a monster in 2020 and it remains overqualified for the entire eight-bit-through-sixth-generation-portable canon. If your emulation ambitions live here, and for a huge share of people they genuinely do, you are choosing between two devices that run your games identically and one of them costs $35 less. Once you have flashed a front-end onto a card, whether you go the Android route or a dedicated OS like the one covered in our Batocera install walkthrough, the experience below this line is the same on both.

The 8 Gen 2's territory: GameCube, PS2, Switch

Above that floor, the 6 pulls away, and this is where it earns its keep. Dolphin-driven GameCube and Wii go from selective on the 5, where you cherry-pick titles and accept the occasional dip, to broad on the 6, where most of the library simply works. PlayStation 2 is the headline: the 5 can run a sample of the catalogue, mostly at native resolution and mostly the friendlier titles, while the 6 opens up the demanding half and, as DaveC measured, upscales to 1080p at a full 60 frames. The Switch scene, running on the tangle of forks that outlived the Yuzu shutdown, is the most volatile tier of all, but the pattern holds: the 5 manages entry-level titles, the 6 manages more of them with fewer stutters. If any of these three consoles is the reason you are shopping, stop doing arithmetic and buy the 6.

The ceiling neither clears, and the law that lets them try

Be clear about the wall. PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Wii U are out of reach on both machines, full stop. No firmware update changes that; it is a silicon problem, not a software one. And since we are discussing running other companies' software, the law deserves a paragraph, because The Machine reads case files for fun. Emulation itself is legal, and it is legal because of two lawsuits from the turn of the millennium. In Sony Computer Entertainment v. Connectix, the Ninth Circuit held that reverse-engineering a console's BIOS to build an emulator was fair use. The parallel fight over Bleem! reinforced it. Those rulings are the legal bedrock these handhelds stand on, which is why Retroid can sell them in the open. What is not settled in your favour is the ROM. The clean path is to own the game and dump it yourself, exactly the process laid out in our guide to dumping your own SNES carts. And the modern wrinkle: Nintendo's 2024 suit against the maker of the Yuzu Switch emulator settled for $2.4 million, and it hinged on circumventing the console's encryption, not on emulation being illegal. Emulate freely. Acquire carefully.

Five Ways to Hold It

Specs are abstract. Play sessions are not. Here is how the choice actually shakes out across the five ways people really use these machines, because the right answer genuinely changes depending on who is holding the thing.

The casual player and the commuter

The casual player dips into a handful of comfort games, an RPG here, a platformer there, nothing above the PSP tier. For them the 5 is not a compromise; it is the correct machine, because it runs everything they will ever load at full speed and pockets $35. The commuter, playing in twenty-minute bursts on a train, cares most about battery and instant resume, and here the two diverge slightly: the 6's larger cell and faster charging give a little more slack across a long day of light play, but the 5 is close enough that the price still wins. For both of these people, buying the 6 is buying headroom they will spend approximately never.

The completionist and the speedrunner

The completionist wants the whole library, including the sixth-generation heavyweights, and refuses to keep a mental list of what does and does not run. That refusal is worth $35. The 6's broad GameCube support and its command of the PS2 catalogue mean fewer titles get quietly filed under too-slow, and the completionist's collection stays whole. The speedrunner is the interesting case: they need frame-perfect input and, above all, consistency, a game that holds its target frame rate without the stutters that ruin a run. On the demanding tiers the 6's thermal headroom and its fan are precisely what deliver that consistency, where the 5 might hold 60 for a while and then throttle. For sub-PSP speed games, the 5 is flawless. For anything the 6 was built to unlock, the runner wants the 6.

The couch co-op session

Both machines output to a television over USB-C and pair Bluetooth controllers, so both can anchor a two-player couch session. The difference is what you can play together. Local co-op on the demanding tier, two players in an upscaled GameCube or PS2 game on the big screen, is exactly the workload that separates these devices, and the 6 handles it with the frame stability the 5 starts to lose. For sixteen-bit and PS1 co-op, which is a gloriously deep well on its own, the 5 is once again all the machine anyone needs. The pattern is relentlessly consistent: the ceiling of your ambition, not the genre, decides the winner.

The Field

Neither Pocket exists in a vacuum. The Android handheld market in 2026 is crowded, and both devices are defined as much by what sits above and below them as by each other.

Where the two Pockets sit

The Pocket 5 anchors the sensible-value slot: a former flagship chip, a lovely panel, and a price that keeps drifting down as it ages. The Pocket 6 sits one rung up, at the point where a pocketable body can credibly chew on the sixth console generation. Above them looms a bigger, hungrier class of machine; below them sits the budget tier where compromises get real. Here is the neighbourhood.

Peer prices and specs are approximate, drawn from maker listings and prior StaresBack coverage; the non-Retroid rows exist to place the two Pockets in context, not to be litigated to the dollar.

The device that makes the 6 look cheap

The AYN Odin 3 is the machine that reframes the whole conversation. It runs a Qualcomm Dragonwing Q8, a handheld-tuned relative of the Snapdragon 8 Elite with the phone modem and camera silicon stripped out, and it brute-forces the demanding tier at 4x to 6x native where the 6 manages a more modest multiple. It also costs $369 from September 2026, weighs 390 grams, and stretches to a six-inch body that is no longer pocketable in any honest sense. We put the two head-to-head in our Pocket 6 versus Odin 3 breakdown, and the short version is that you pay roughly $120 more for perhaps four times the PS2 muscle, most of which you will not use. Ban, reviewing for Retro Handhelds, put the trade-off perfectly: the 8 Elite class stands above everything else in terms of power, but if you want pure compatibility, any 8 Gen 2 handheld might be better for your needs. That is the 6's entire pitch, delivered by a rival's reviewer.

The devices that make the 5 look smart

Look the other direction and the Pocket 5 looks like the adult in the room. Retroid's own budget entry, the Nova, undercuts both on price while giving up the flagship chip, and we ran the full three-way in our Nova versus 6 versus 5 comparison. And then there is the Steam Deck OLED, an x86 machine that is genuinely a different animal, running native PC games and topping the emulation charts, at a size and a $549-plus price these Pockets are not competing with and were never meant to. The Deck is not a reason to skip a Retroid; it is a reminder of what the next $300 buys and how differently it plays.

Price and Availability

The pricing on these two is a small case study in how strange the 2026 hardware market got, and it is worth walking through because the numbers are moving targets.

The price went up, which is not supposed to happen

Hardware is meant to get cheaper as it ages. The Pocket 6 did the opposite. It opened at a $209 pre-order for the 8GB/128GB model, reached $229 at retail, and then rose to $244, where it has largely sat since. The culprit was the 2026 memory shortage, the same crunch squeezing RAM and storage prices across the entire industry. Retroid said as much directly, citing, in a statement reported by Time Extension, ongoing shortages and sharply rising costs for both RAM and storage. The company briefly killed the 12GB configuration entirely, then revived it as a 12GB/128GB model at $279, a worse memory-to-storage ratio than the 12GB/256GB it replaced. The Gadgeteer, checking in four months after launch, confirmed the 6 still selling at $244. The 5, meanwhile, has drifted the way hardware is supposed to, settling at a $209 base.

The pricing timeline

What to actually pay, and when

The number that matters for this comparison is the current gap: $209 for the 5, $244 for the 6, a $35 delta. Ignore the pre-order and launch figures except as evidence that these prices float; buy the configuration, not the promotion. The 8GB/128GB tier is the sane default on both machines, since a microSD card is a far cheaper way to add game storage than paying the memory-shortage premium for a bigger internal drive. The 12GB Pocket 6 exists for people who want to hold open a door to heavier Android use, but for pure emulation the 8GB model leaves nothing meaningful on the table.

Who Should Buy Which

Recommendations, stated plainly, because the whole point of a review is to end somewhere useful. Find yourself in one of these.

Buy the Pocket 5 if

One: your library tops out at the Dreamcast, the PSP, the N64, or the PS1, which describes a large majority of people who think they need more. Two: you are price-conscious and the $35 is genuinely $35 you would rather keep. Three: you prefer the smaller, lighter, fan-less body and value silence over sustained peak performance. Four: you do not care about 120Hz because you are here for the games, not the launcher animations. For all four of these people the 5 is not the compromise pick. It is the correct pick, and the 8.5 rating it earns below is not a participation trophy.

Buy the Pocket 6 if

Five: you specifically want GameCube, Wii, PS2, or Switch, and you want the broad half of those libraries rather than a curated sample. Six: you want the device to stay relevant across more years and more emulator maturity, since the 8 Gen 2 has more runway left than the 865. Seven: you value the 120Hz panel, the analog triggers, and the faster charging as a bundle, independent of the chip. Eight: you are a speedrunner or completionist whose targets live on the demanding tier, where the fan and the thermal headroom convert directly into frame-rate consistency. For these people the $35 is not a premium; it is the cheapest part of the hobby.

Buy neither if

Nine: your budget is genuinely under $150, in which case the Nova or a good dedicated Linux handheld serves you better than stretching to a compromised Pocket. Ten: you want native PC gaming alongside emulation, in which case save toward a Steam Deck and accept the size. Eleven: you are a tinkerer who enjoys the build as much as the play, in which case a self-assembled setup, right down to the reasons laid out in our piece on why RetroPie still has no Windows build, may scratch an itch neither Retroid does. Twelve: your absolute priority is maximum PS2 and Switch brute force and you will happily carry a 390-gram slab to get it, in which case the Odin 3 is your machine and this whole comparison was the wrong aisle.

Pros and Cons

The ledger, both devices, no hedging.

Retroid Pocket 6

Pros:

• Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 with the Adreno 740, up to +189% GPU over the 5 in 3DMark Wild Life Extreme (DROIX)
• Broad GameCube and Wii support; opens the demanding half of the PS2 catalogue at upscaled 1080p 60fps
• 120Hz AMOLED panel makes the whole device feel modern
• 6,000mAh battery with fast 27W charging
• Active cooling delivers sustained, consistent performance under load
• Analog L2/R2 triggers and 3D hall sticks; Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.3

Cons:

• The fan is audible under heavy load
• Larger and heavier at ~307g
• Price rose after launch and refuses to fall, thanks to the memory shortage
• Every advantage over the 5 lives above the PSP tier; below it, you paid $35 for nothing

Retroid Pocket 5

Pros:

• Runs the entire canon through Dreamcast and PSP at full speed, identically to the 6
• $35 cheaper, and drifting down the way hardware should
• Smaller, lighter, and completely silent with no fan
• The same excellent AMOLED panel and hall-effect sticks

Cons:

• Selective on GameCube and Wii; only samples the PS2 library
• 60Hz panel makes the Android front-end feel a step behind
• The 865 has less future runway as emulators grow more demanding
• Basic shoulder buttons rather than analog triggers

The shared caveats

Both are Android machines, which means both ask for a degree of setup and front-end fiddling that a dedicated retro OS spares you, and both ship, quite legally, with no games on them whatsoever. Neither touches the PS3-and-up ceiling. And both are subject to the same 2026 pricing turbulence, so treat every number here as accurate at the time of writing and verify before you buy.

The Verdict

Two machines, two ratings, and a deliberate refusal to let the more expensive one win by default.

The Pocket 6 is the better machine — 8.0 / 10

Let there be no confusion: the Pocket 6 is the superior piece of hardware, and it is not close on a spec sheet. It is faster in every benchmark, it commands console tiers the 5 can only sample, its panel is smoother, its battery larger, its cooling real. For the buyer whose ambitions genuinely reach GameCube, PS2, and Switch, it is the obvious and correct purchase, and DaveC's upscaled-1080p-at-60fps is the receipt. It scores an 8.0 rather than higher because its every advantage is concentrated above the PSP line, because the memory shortage kept its price stubbornly high, and because a large share of the people who buy it will never once load a game that needs what they paid for.

The Pocket 5 is the better buy — 8.5 / 10

And here is the contrarian half that the whole review has been building toward. The Pocket 5 scores higher, an 8.5, not because it is faster than the 6, which it plainly is not, but because for the majority of the people reading this it is the smarter allocation of money. It runs the entire canon that most buyers actually play at identical full speed, it does so silently and in a smaller body, and it does it for $35 less. On the StaresBack scale, which weighs fitness-for-purpose and value rather than raw silicon, the machine that does everything you need for less money is the machine that wins. The 5 is that machine for most people, and pretending otherwise to reward a bigger number would be dishonest.

The Machine's ruling

Buy the Pocket 5, and only step up to the Pocket 6 if you can name, specifically, the sixth-generation and Switch-era games you intend to play on it. If you can name them, the 6 is worth every one of its $35 and the fan noise that comes with it. If you cannot, if you are reaching for the more expensive box because it is the more expensive box, you are about to spend money to make sixteen-bit games run at exactly the speed they already run on the cheaper one. The better machine and the better buy are two different products in this generation. Most of you want the second one.