Anbernic RG SP Review: Slimmer, Cheaper, and Better Than Expected
Anbernic’s lineup is a hall of mirrors — every shelf holds another RG XX variant, and the H700 chip keeps turning up like the house’s favorite relative. The RG SP breaks the pattern by being the closest thing Anbernic has shipped to an actual Game Boy Advance SP: 83 x 82 x 24mm, 168 grams, zero analog sticks, and a $58 price on Amazon that undercuts its own clamshell siblings. It also lands at an awkward moment — the memory shortage everyone’s calling RAMageddon has already forced the RG34XXSP down to 1GB of RAM, and the RG SP ships with that same compromise baked in.
The result is a device easier to recommend than its spec sheet suggests and harder to live with than its dimensions promise. The good: a slimmer shell than any Anbernic clamshell before it, and a stock OS that finally doesn’t embarrass itself. The catch: a lid that often doesn’t sleep, and an emulation ceiling a few inches lower than it would have been a year ago.
The SP Clone That Out-Slims the SP
Dimension for dimension, the RG SP nearly mirrors the 2003 original: it’s slightly shorter, 0.4mm thinner, and at 168g it sits only 25g off the GBA SP’s featherweight 143g. Against Anbernic’s own clamshells, the gap is more obvious — the RG35XXSP is a whole 24g heavier and 3mm thicker, while the RG34XXSP splits the difference. That thinness is the entire pitch: this is a device you slip into a pocket and forget about, not a slab you feel all day.
Authenticity has a price, though. The reviewer’s hand cramping after an hour of Pokémon Pinball is the same complaint that followed the original SP around for two decades — a body this small asks your hands to do more work than a modern handheld would. Games that demand constant shoulder-button taps will tire you out, while turn-based RPGs and Gen1Recomp Pokémon sessions are exactly what this form factor is built for. If you’re the type who plays pinball for hours, grab a grip case and accept the tradeoff.
1GB of DDR3: What RAMageddon Costs You
Performance is the H700 story you already know: solid through PS1 and PSP with some N64 and Dreamcast thrown in — and only when you pick your fights, because the RG SP has no analog sticks to save you from a tanky N64 camera. The new wrinkle is the memory. The swap from DDR4 to 1GB DDR3 is a direct casualty of the shortage inflating memory prices across the industry, and Anbernic is clearly consolidating parts across devices to ride it out.
Practically, it means the ceiling drops at the edges: demanding PortMaster titles that needed more than 1GB of headroom are now a no-go, and Gen1Recomp runs vanilla only — mods are out of reach. For the retro systems this device actually targets, 1GB is plenty. But it also means the RG SP and the downgraded RG34XXSP are functionally the same machine, which is exactly the point of the exercise: one part bin, two shells, and $3 of price difference between them.
A Usable Stock OS, and One Infuriating Sleep Bug
Anbernic’s stock Linux firmware has been rehabilitated over the last year, and the RG SP shows it. On-the-fly shader cycling — dotmatrix, scanline, and a few others — straight from the menu button is the kind of small win that makes stock firmware livable instead of the first thing you replace. The button-sound default remains an insult, but that’s one menu toggle away from solved.
The real problem is the lid. The SP’s defining gesture is closing the clamshell to sleep, and on this unit that gesture is unreliable — the power LED stays lit, the 3300mAh battery keeps draining, and you come back hours later to a handheld that never actually napped. Anbernic might patch it, but the CFW scene won’t wait: KNULLI already got far enough to play menu music at press time, and a dedicated H700 NextUI build is in the works. Expect full custom firmware coverage in a couple of weeks — and expect it to fix sleep long before Anbernic does.
Buying advice is refreshingly simple. If a GBA SP clone is the goal, this is the one: the thinnest, the cheapest at $58, and the closest to the original’s proportions. The only reason to look elsewhere is if you can still find the older 2GB RG34XXSP variant sitting in a warehouse — that extra gigabyte is real headroom for a slightly thicker shell. Otherwise, the RG SP is the answer, and if Anbernic’s pattern holds, new colorways are coming while the RG34XXSP quietly fades from the lineup — leaving the SP as the definitive SP-style device in the catalog.