The ultimate Game Boy for the modern era?

I’ve said it before when testing modern handhelds, but I’m a sucker for anything related to the original Game Boy. I still have my old carts, as well as two copies of nearly every Game Boy handheld (for Pokémon trading, of course). So when AYANEO announced a fanciful Game Boy clone unlike anything I’ve ever seen, I was immediately intrigued.

Coming at it from the perspective of a Game Boy fan, this device is a dream come true. The CNC metal finish. The perfect 10x resolution. The scroll wheel on the side. The immaculate hand feel.

But from the perspective of someone who tests Android gaming handhelds, it’s very confusing. The strange combination of components and pricing makes it difficult to pin down exactly who this device is for. But after a week of testing, I think I finally have the answer.

At first glance, it’s clear that the Pocket VERT is trying its hardest to do something different. It’s a very jarring break from the toy-like designs of OG Game Boys (which AYANEO adopted for the Pocket DMG), favoring a much more modern look that feels more at home alongside modern iPhones.

Taking it out of the box, the first thing that struck me was just how cold it is. Both in terms of physical temperature (it’s winter here, after all) and in terms of the design itself. The clicky microswitch buttons are unlabeled gems, the “diamond cut” shoulder buttons are all hard edges, and it has a minimal, all-glass front that’s completely free from blemishes (or character).

Even by AYANEO’s standards, the Pocket VERT feels excessively premium. It felt even more premium than the Pocket Micro Classic I reviewed in 2025, and it’s clear that the company didn’t pull any punches in its design.

The components are also largely among the best on the market, starting with a screen that offers perfect 10x resolution for Game Boy emulation. It’s likely the exact same panel as the Analogue Pocket, and despite being an LTPS LCD display, it makes games pop like with the right shaders applied.

That said, there were situations where that incredibly high PPI display was a hindrance. The touch inputs were a little finicky, and some text was absolutely tiny. This wasn’t an issue once things were set up, and I could navigate my frontend using the controls.

Speaking of the controls, the Pocket VERT has way too many of them. The D-pad and face buttons are great and very responsive, with another button opening AYANEO’s quick settings sidebar. The final face button controls the handheld’s most unique feature: a hidden touchpad.

While I was initially excited to test this out, the reality was much less compelling. It can switch between emulating the left stick, the right stick, both sticks (split down the middle), or a cursor. The process to switch between them is simple, although the UI is still in Chinese, as you can see below.

However, actually using the touchpad is pretty rough. I’ve done enough mobile gaming on smartphones to get used to touchscreen controls, but the size of the pad is the real culprit. It takes a small amount of movement before your inputs register, and I found my thumbs constantly slipping past the edge of the pad. I did enjoy using it to revisit The Day of the Tentacle and other point-and-click adventure games, but for sticks, this isn’t it.

That being said, I appreciate that AYANEO is one of the few gaming handheld companies that’s still taking big swings. I hope these come back in some form in a future handheld, because there’s some potential there.

Thankfully, the other experimental element here is a success. The so-called MagicSwitch Scroll Wheel is inherited from the AYANEO Pocket DMG, but the software has been refined to make it more useful than ever. By default, scrolling up or down adjusts the volume, but holding down the button allows you to swap functions. It can also control brightness, performance profiles, vibration, fan speed, and even RetroArch shaders.

Granted, volume is by far the most useful and the one most faithful to the Game Boy experience (sorry, useless contrast wheel). I very rarely want to swap shaders on the fly, and when I do, I’d rather just open the menu.

AYANEO has a bad habit of choosing chipsets that are way too powerful than they need to be, and the Pocket VERT is no exception. This is the first time the company has used the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1, and on paper, it’s a very solid performer.

I ran the device through our benchmarking suite and compared it with the other most notable vertical handhelds, the Retroid Pocket Classic and ANBERNIC RG 477V.

The results weren’t too surprising, but the main takeaway is that the Pocket VERT is the most powerful vertical handheld on the market. The MediaTek Dimensity 8300 on the RG 477V gets a slight edge when it comes to GPU performance, but not by much. AYANEO could have gotten away with a much cheaper chipset, but again, that’s not how this company works.

Benchmarks are one thing, but in practice, things are a lot more complicated. Obviously it has stellar performance for Game Boy and Game Boy Color games, with enough power to run any and all shaders you can think of.

It’s also pretty good for other retro consoles up to PS1 and N64. The screen supports 5x upscaling for both systems, and with some clever remapping, the touchpad can serve as a solid alternative to the N64’s notoriously difficult-to-emulate C buttons. That’s typically the worst part of revisiting N64 games, and it’s cool that the VERT’s control scheme is flexible enough to support it.

Beyond that, things get dicey. It can run PS2 and GameCube games just fine, but anything that needs sticks is seriously compromised. The screen size is also an issue, since the text is often so small that it’s borderline unreadable. I was surprised to enjoy these consoles on a vertical handheld for the first time with the RG 477V, but the Pocket VERT doesn’t hit the same bar.

The situation is worse for 16:9 systems like the PSP or Nintendo Switch. I was able to get a few Switch games to run on Eden thanks to the powerful chipset, but it wasn’t something I particularly enjoyed. Between the extreme letterboxing, the tiny text, and the poor stick inputs, it’s not a fun time.

It fared a little better in PC emulation, but not by much. There are some lightweight indie games that can run on GameHub or GameNative, and as long as they don’t need sticks, they’re certainly playable. Slower point-and-click games fared better, especially with the touchpad in cursor mode, but again, the small screen is a major roadblock to actually enjoying them.

That said, the intended purpose here is still what it does best, and that’s Game Boy emulation. I absolutely loved playing Game Boy games on this thing in a way that I haven’t since the 90s.

At the start of this review, I mentioned that I now understand who and what this device is for, and in retrospect, it was pretty obvious from the start. Despite the powerful chipset and hidden touchpads, this is a Game Boy emulation device for Game Boy fanatics like me.

To that end, the Pocket VERT offers the best Game Boy experience I’ve ever had in software emulation. It has the right kind of hardware (and software) enhancements to augment the authentic Game Boy games I loved as a kid, without feeling like a completely new game. Sure, it’s not as authentic as an FPGA device, but the addition of save states and shaders makes it more palatable to modern gaming tastes.

Now, is that worth nearly $300? That’s not so easy to say. The honest truth is that you can get 90% of the way there on a cheap handheld like the TrimUI Brick ($84.99 at Amazon). But for the most dedicated Game Boy fans, the Pocket VERT is a worthy addition to the collection. For everyone else, stick to something cheaper.