Living with RG351MP

Zhou Ge (Maxzhou) is one of those figures in the “open-source handheld” scene who gets both love and hate.

The love is because he keeps cranking out new products, and the new products generally look pretty good.

The hate is because they’re all expensive, the performance gains are minimal, and people roast him for “harvesting the leeks.”

Honestly, though, while there’s profit in Zhou Ge’s machines, calling it leek-harvesting is a stretch. His machines just take open-source designs and pile on a lot of his own tweaks and optimizations—higher-quality metal shells, better-feeling conductive rubber pads and metal dome switches, and so on. You can argue this kind of handheld isn’t worth that much, but if you bought one and modded it yourself, the cost wouldn’t be much lower than buying straight from Zhou Ge. Think of it as buying a fully modded open-source handheld out of the box, saving you the hassle later.

From that angle, it’s really not that expensive.

So what’s the highlight of the RG351MP this time?

• The board is the same one from the Odroid Go Advance, so the performance is identical
• Swapped in a 640x480 IPS screen
• Ships with quality conductive rubber pads and metal dome switches
• Modded with dual speakers
• Supports dual TF cards, boots from the first TF card by default, the second TF card can hold games
• Dual USB-C ports, one for charging, one for OTG
• Dual analog sticks, both support L3 and R3
• Physical buttons for volume control, not an easily bumped scroll wheel
• New blue and green colorways

Anyway, I bought one. I knew Zhou Ge was going to release a big-screen product called the RG551 later, but once I learned it was an “Android handheld” I lost interest. When an “open-source handheld” stops running Linux and runs Android instead, it’s not really an open-source handheld anymore. Sure, the RG551 could run Linux later too, but good luck getting a decent system adapted to it.

The stock system on the RG351MP is a modified 351Elec, and it actually has problems running NES games—they run too fast. I asked Zhou Ge’s official channel and nobody bothered to answer me, so the only fix was switching to a third-party system. Fortunately there are quite a few systems adapted for the RG351MP now. I personally use ArkOS, which runs all kinds of games without issue, and a big perk of ArkOS is Wifi Update support, so I no longer have to pull the card out every so often to update it myself.

As you can see, ArkOS is based on Ubuntu, exactly the same as the stock OGA system.

Oh right, the RG351MP has no Wi-Fi module, but thankfully it comes with a USB-C Wi-Fi adapter in the box—just plug it in.

Honestly I don’t have much interest in playing emulators on this thing. What I want more is to play ported games, and ArkOS is a pretty good platform for running ports. I’ll keep tinkering with it and try to finally beat Quake 2 on this thing.