PowKiddy V90 Review -- How is this only $40?

[Music] hey everybody this is russ from retro gamecore so as you may know i've only been involved in retro handheld gaming for about six months now but one of the trends i've noticed is that a lot of people are focused on the next big thing you know they're waiting for that next device that's gonna solve all their problems but over the past couple months i've realized that there are a lot of hidden gems available out there in the market and so i started going back and looking at some of the devices that i've missed over the past year or so and one of those devices which i'm going to talk about today is the pow kitty v90 now when you look at this thing on online markets it's not very impressive it reminds me of just a kid's toy or something and it has a kids toy price to it you can find it for under forty dollars almost all the time and sometimes you can find it for under thirty five dollars when it's on sale and i'm here to tell you that this little clamshell device which reminds me of the game boy advance sp is worth every one of those pennies and at this low of a price i had very low expectations i figured it would play game boy and gay boy color okay but probably not super nintendo or game boy advance it turns out that they play those actually rather well and on top of that you can even play some ps1 games on it but probably the thing i like most about it is that it takes advantage of years of work for other devices that are very similar because it can run that same firmware so here we are with a device that's under 40 dollars has a mature firmware and is actually kind of a pleasure to play so without any further delay let's check this one out so let's start off with some of the specs so this device runs an all winner f1c100s which is the same chipset that's found in the q90 which is a similar device but looks a little bit like a very small nintendo switch it has a megahertz cpu and only 32 megabytes of ram now when it comes to the screen it has a 3 inch ips display with a 320 by 240 resolution and a 4x3 aspect ratio and honestly this is ideal for classic gaming basically everything up through ps1 is going to play really well on this and as you'll see in a second i really like this display now at first glance it has a pretty small battery it's only about a thousand milliamp hours and it's only going to give you about two hours of performance but as i'll show you here in a minute it has a nokia phone battery and it's really easy to swap out and then on top of that it has some of the same specs that you would expect for any of these devices that come out in 2020 and beyond it has a usbc charging port a headphone jack and then an sd card slot for all your storage and from what i've read the mac storage capability for these cards is 128 gigs so overall these specs aren't very impressive but i want you to keep in mind this device costs under forty dollars so instead of comparing it to something you could buy for 75 or even a hundred dollars think about it from that perspective okay let's move on to the unboxing okay there's not really much to say about this box obviously it's not very impressive the one thing i do want to point out is just how weird this picture is like look at how small these hands are compared to this device like whose hands did they use for this i don't even get it like it looks like he's holding a laptop or something it's really weird now it says it comes in black and yellow and red but i've only ever seen the yellow and red version so opening up nothing special about it has a usbc cable as well as an instruction manual one funny thing i found about the instruction manual is it has a section that says hey don't blame us for these bad emulators if they don't work the way you expect it's because the emulator's fault not ours and from a software perspective i obviously disagree with that if they're going to bake in emulators into their device they should take responsibility for them but yeah this is what it looks like nothing crazy or anything i'm not a huge fan of this orange color here they actually call it koi fish red in the marketing materials either way it's just not very impressive as you can see it comes loaded with a 16 gigabyte card and this already has a bunch of games on it but i've been told that this card is very unreliable so you're just going to want to swap it out as soon as you can so on this right side it has a power switch as well as the sd card slot in the bottom here you can see the usbc charging port as well as a headphone jack i really like that they put these on the bottom it makes it very convenient to access on the left you see there's a volume wheel it sticks out a little bit more than i'd like but i really like having volume wheels on these devices and then just feeling these four shoulder buttons they actually feel pretty good they're more mushy than clicky and i was expecting them to be very clicky when it comes down to it i actually kind of like these in the back here you can see where the battery goes and like i mentioned before this is just a nokia phone battery here and you can actually just pick these up on ebay for like three or four dollars and not only that they actually have higher capacity batteries you can get a 1600 milliamp hour battery for about eight dollars and if you think about it these batteries are not going to last a long time and a lot of the devices that people buy today and of all the devices this is going to be the easiest one to upgrade or replace because you have that easy access to the battery slot so honestly i think that's a really big win okay let's open it up so the first thing i noticed about the screen is one it's actually pretty big but then two i saw there's a little bit of a bubble on the top there and after talking to some people on discord i learned that there's actually a film that's on there that's very hard to get off so what you have to do is you have to either unscrew the casing around it and then peel it off that way or you have to pick at it with a needle until you can pull it out gently neither of those cases are ideal what i actually ended up doing is just unscrewing it and pulling it out myself but after i took out that plastic film everything was a lot better i mean i don't think it's ideal that they have this film on there in the first place because it's kind of confusing are you supposed to leave it are you supposed to take it off but i'm here to say just go ahead and take it off okay moving on to the face now with the device the first thing that catches my eye are these two dual stereo speakers personally i like the way that they face you as the player it means you're gonna get all the sound right to you and honestly these face buttons and the d-pad they're not that bad they feel a lot like other pow kitty devices so the rgb 10 or the rgb 20 they remind me of that and i really don't think that's a bad thing you know the plastic they use for these buttons and d-pad they're very soft on the hands and i really like that something like the pocket go s30 is a lot harder on your fingers than something like this and all of these buttons are nice and mushy other than that menu button that one's clicky and none of the other ones are overall it feels pretty good to hold in the hands i do think it's a little bit top-heavy because that screen is at the back there but otherwise it's actually kind of pleasant to hold i thought it was going to be a little bit cramped to hold my hands but i didn't get that experience at all so let's turn it on and see what it's like so as you can see it's running the nx hope firmware and i've actually experimented a little bit with this firmware before because i owned a pocket go version one for a few months and so it just has this kind of tile display as you can see here this is not my favorite way to navigate new games but at the same time i respect the simplicity of it so when i unboxed this i already already heard about the custom firmware but at the same time i wanted to try out some of the stock games that are available so let's start with game boy so here we are with super mario land and you know right out of the box i started playing it and i was kind of just enjoying myself for a minute and something was kind of bothering me in the back of my mind and i couldn't really figure out for a second but then i realized what it is it's because this screen looks pretty good like because of the 4x3 aspect ratio and the 320 by 240 display everything comes out really balanced and it was just weird to me because i spent so much time dealing with three by two aspect ratios that it just felt unnatural to have something look so good right out of the box i mean you can spend a hundred dollars on the rg 351p and then you have to spend several hours getting the image to look right this device which costs under forty dollars looks great right out of the box now the speakers they use in this device aren't the best but i think the sound is pretty good and one thing i noticed is you can see a little led light there to let you know that the device is on so as expected game boy color also looks nice everything looks just as balanced as it does with game boy these both use the same emulator now as i was playing one of the things i noticed is that my thumbs kind of cover the speakers and so it muffles the sound a little bit so you either have to adjust the way you hold it or you just have to get used to the sound there and i'm not really sure they could have put the speakers anywhere better anyway but that's just something to keep in mind is that you do cover a little bit of the sound [Music] okay with game boy advance you basically have two options you can either run it in a scaled three by two aspect ratio which means you're going to have black bars at the top and bottom or you can try to play it at full screen which means you're gonna have a little bit of stretching so as you can see here samus looks just a little bit tall and skinny to me and that's because i'm running it full screen here but you could change it back to the 3x2 if you'd like now nes games don't look very good when they're stretched to full screen as you can see it looks very clear here with a one times integer scaling and that's what i'd recommend you use same thing with super nintendo it looks good at integer scaling of one but if you try to stretch it to full screen like you see here the text starts to get a little bit weird looking so as always this is personal preference but it's going to be a decision you'll have to make now super nintendo emulation out of the box is not good as you can see here it's missing some of the back screen and then some of the audio is glitchy as well and then when i was playing other games like donkey kong country i was definitely noticing slow down so i decided to try mario world 2 which is usually the hardest game to run for the super nintendo and as you can see here it's running at a frame skip of 4 just to make it somewhat playable but to me it's not really playable at all because that frame skip of 4 just makes it really kind of glitchy feeling and it's not very fun to play so in general out of the box i had seen enough and i thought okay let's move on to the custom firmware so let me show you that one so as you can see here there's an entire repository for custom firmware for devices that are very similar to this one so the bit boy version 2 bit boy version 3 as well as the pocket go version 1 and the pow kitty q90 all of them use the same custom firmware so i'll have a link to this github page in my written review which i'll have on my website and linked below but it's a very simple setup you basically just install this firmware to a new sd card and then expand the partition and on top of that i'll also leave links to new emulators that i found and other tweaks that i made to make it even better now i'm really happy with this custom firmware so let me show it off to you now like i mentioned before i really appreciate that they're using a very mature firmware like this because you get to jump in and take advantage of all the work that these developers have been doing for years now so right off the bat you're going to notice that it has a much more streamlined interface you basically just tab through the different systems and then pick your games and i love that everything is uniform and streamlined and i'm just going to tab through these really quickly so you can just see all the options they have available to you and not only that you can actually just remove any of the ones you don't want to see so on top of a bunch of emulators they also have a bunch of ports so you can play all sorts of games everything from doom and all the different mods and then hexen and heretic and quake 1 and 2 all of those are available for you and i'm going to say this i don't know how many times throughout this video but this is a 40 device and after installing this custom firmware there are dozens of different games and systems that you can play on this at the end of the day this is just really impressive for the price and there are also a lot of skins that are available to you as well so i'm just gonna tap through those so you can get a feel of what's available for you personally i ended up using the comic book one i just like how bright and vivid it is and it's kind of in keeping with the toy aspect of this device and if you want a traditional feel they have that as well you can see here they have the g menu 2x which honestly just feels a lot like the rg 350. now if there's a system on there and you know you're never going to use it for example this one here all you have to do is hit the select button and then just pick delete whatever it is and that's it you can just go through and delete all the different emulators you like okay let's test out gameplay performance overall i'm not going to spend too much time on the lower end system just because we already saw those but here's link's awakening now one of the things i noticed is that it has very rich colors now one of the things you can do with this is you can change the different filters so you can make it not so harsh on your eyes again it's all personal preference but i personally like to see it this way i think overall when it comes to playing game boy and game boy color games this is the ideal design and just feel overall i really really like this feel so as you can see here game boy advance looks great you can see here with full screen resolution it's still a little bit tall looking so personally i like to use the 3x2 aspect ratio scaled so you have a little bit of black bars on the top and bottom but i don't think it's a big deal in terms of performance every game that i threw at it played pretty well in the game boy advance so here we are with zelda 2 on the nes here and overall most games played really well but i will say that certain games for example mega man 2 were a little bit slow so i ended up testing and installing a new beta version of this nes emulator and it fixed all those problems so i'll leave links to that emulator in my written review on my website you can see here with super mario world all the background colors are fixed the sounds are fixed as well there's a tiny bit of screen tearing that i noticed with this and there is still a little bit of slowdown on certain games but for something like super mario world it ran perfectly now as you can see here with super mario world 2 it's still having issues here so i think when it comes down to it you just can't expect to play every single super nintendo game well on this device which again costs only forty dollars you know one thing i noticed about this device also is that it's easy to play with one hand so if you're trying to play a final fantasy game for example on the super nintendo you're trying to play a pokemon game this is something you could do one-handed while you're like playing on your phone or something else like that okay moving on to sega genesis here this one looked really really good and a lot of it has to do with the native resolution of the sega genesis but in general i think this one is really good if you like sega genesis games or maybe sega cd games this is going to be an ideal device for those okay so moving on to arcade here honestly i didn't have a lot of main roms that matched this particular rom set but when it came to final burn neo everything played really well as you can see here street fighter alpha 3 is running well i think in general classic arcade games from the early 90s are going to play really well as you can see final fight looks great now honestly some of the higher end ones like the cps3 games i don't think you should expect much from those but when it comes down to it the classic ones do really well neo geo games use a standalone emulator and they also play really well the sound is really good on these ones too i mean look at how crisp and clear that looks okay moving on to ps1 i had very low expectations for ps1 gameplay here and i'm actually using a frame skip of one here on crash team racing and it's running okay i don't think it's very enjoyable but at the same time if you really are desperate to play a couple low end playstation games you'll be able to play it on this device as well for example in terms of gameplay castlevania sympathy and knight played really well but as you can see here the text is kind of weird so nothing's perfect when it comes down to playstation one okay let's do some comparison with some other smaller devices on the left you see is the trim ui a model s in the middle is the amber neck rg 280 v and then the right obviously is the power kdb 90. now the screen on the trim ui model s is just tiny and i don't think it's a good comparison so we're not even going to look at it and obviously the rg280v is much brighter and crisper but this device cost 80 retail so it's twice the price of this other one now when it comes to the actual feel of playing these devices the pow kitty v90 feels very natural because you have a natural resting place for your index fingers because of that it feels good to hold it in your hands i also like that the speakers are facing up despite the fact that you do tend to cover them with your thumbs now the 280v is a different story the buttons feel definitely much better the screen looks better but there's kind of an awkward place to put your index fingers and the sound comes out of the back which is a little bit weird as well in general there's no easy way to hold it if you try to hold your index fingers low you feel like it's going to topple over so you basically have to put your index finger in this no man's land up by the shoulder buttons now make no mistake about it i like these buttons better and the build quality is much better on the 280v but i have a hard time justifying the fact that it's double the price of this other device which feels better to play in the hands sure the buttons are a little bit cheaper looking and feeling but i kind of like that aspect honestly okay some quick specs when it comes to weight so the 280v is 4.37 ounces and the trim ui is only 2.33 ounces the pal kitty v9 is somewhere in the middle there with 3.95 ounces which is just a little bit lighter than the 280v itself comparing the sizes of the two you can see that the kitty v 90 is a little bit thicker than the other one but one thing to keep in mind is that the screen and the face buttons are all covered and protected using that folding hitch which means if you want to have the same level of protection for the 280v you have to buy a separate case for it so already you're spending even more money and it's going to be a lot bulkier than the v90 i think when it comes down to it for a clamshell device like this i'm not sure what else pal kitty could have done to make this better like everything is pretty thoughtful you know i like the little battery compartment in the back i like having the headphone and usb jacks in the bottom you can see here with the 280v they're on the top which is always something that's annoyed me in general everything is placed about where i would expect them to be placed and it's something i appreciate with this device and in terms of user interface i think by far i would prefer the custom firmware that's available on the pal kdv90 over the open dingx interface that's found on the 280v this device has a safe shutdown mode so you just go into the settings and then power off the device and then you can just flip the switch off and you know given the fact that i have about 10 devices at this point i had to really kind of figure out where this device stood when it came to all of those and when it came down to it i think this is going to turn into my like beat up device you know it's the one i'm just going to throw in my pocket when i'm running somewhere or whatever and i have a couple minutes to kill i don't have to worry about scratching it up or getting banged up or anything else like that because at this price it's very easy to replace all right let's start breaking it down here let's start with what i like so number one like i've mentioned i don't know how many times at this point i really like this price i think that under 40 dollars really makes it an impulse buy especially when you look at other devices like the trim ui model s which is 50 or even the rg 280v which is 80 40 or below just makes it an easy sell i think this device is very pocketable it's easy to just grab it and take it with you the screen on it is pretty decent obviously it's not a beautiful oca laminated display but at the same time it does what it needs to do and it does give me a nostalgic feel the buttons are pretty good they're not hard or clicky they're you know they're soft and mushy and i think that works really well with the type of games i'm gonna play on this i like that it has a volume wheel it allows me to instantly change the volume without having to memorize any sort of hotkeys or push any sort of extra volume buttons i appreciate that it has an easily replaceable battery because i think it's going to add to the longevity of this device because i can just buy more batteries in the future if this one dies out or if i just wanted to go crazy i could have multiple batteries right now and then i wouldn't have to worry about charging the device all the time and as you saw earlier this custom firmware really improves the gameplay performance as well as the user interface at the end of the day there's nothing really about this device that bothers me and that's probably the best compliment i can give this device so now let's talk about what i don't like and let me caveat all this by saying that the price kind of compensates for the lack of some of these features number one i don't really like these colors this red or orange color as well as the yellow color make it feel a lot more amateurish than they could be i mean it would be super cool if they had all sorts of other different color options that people could buy and maybe install themselves and even though you're not going to be using them that much because of the type of games you're going to be playing i did notice that sometimes the shoulder buttons are a little bit sticky like sometimes when you push down on them they don't come up as quickly as i'd like that whole screen protector thing was really weird like it was hard to figure out one was there a screen protector there and two did i need to remove it and i don't think that should have been there the speaker placement leaves a little bit to be desired but honestly i'm not sure where else they could have put them it's kind of a love hate thing with me i love where they're placed but i hate the fact that i muffle them with my own hands and then the battery life is not great i would expect two maybe three hours of gameplay out of this device but again like i said you could have multiple batteries and you could have kind of a perpetual battery thing going if that was something that was important to you all right everyone that really wraps up my review here you know when i first got this device i had pretty low expectations for under 40 dollars i was expecting it to play game boy maybe game boy advance in some nintendo games but i was pleasantly surprised that not only did to play more games than i expected but i liked the design a lot more than i thought i would i'm a big fan of clamshell devices like this and i think as a budget device it more than delivers so what do you think let me know in the comments below do you think this is worth 40 bucks or less i hope you enjoyed the video and be sure to like and subscribe if you found this helpful for you and we will see you next time happy gaming [Music] you

Channel: Retro Game Corps

Views: 198,275

Keywords:

Id: 3BHkqP7BhSY

Length: 22min 16sec (1336 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 01 2021