Living with Trimui Smart

The Trimui Smart is a pretty unusual early handheld. Unlike the big “shanzhai” makers who lean on the open-source community to supply a “usable system,” Trimui has always built its own custom system, and it actually works well.

Most people know the later Trimui Smart Pro, the handheld that claims it can play PSP — though not comfortably — and whose real selling point is killer standby time (the perk of a custom system is deep optimization), plus the Trimui Brick that carried on the Smart Pro’s traits, and so on…

I’ve actually used both the Trimui Smart Pro and the Trimui Brick, and sold them later. Not because the system was bad — mainly because the build quality was so poor. Burrs everywhere, and the buttons are stiff as hell…

But today we’re not talking about those two. We’re talking about the Trimui Smart, the first product in the line.

Verdict first: I rate the Trimui Smart highly. Not because the build is great, or because it’s somehow better than the later Smart Pro and Brick — mainly because of the price. As a very old machine, you can get a brand-new Trimui Smart on eBay for 100 yuan, or even less.

So what does a machine under 100 yuan actually give you?

It runs almost everything up to PS1 smoothly, the screen colors are good, and the standby time is frankly absurd. You can cut power to it permanently — you’ll never worry about picking it up after months of neglect and finding the battery dead.

There’s also a built-in save function: you can save your current state when you shut down, and it restores right where you left off next time you power on. Pretty thoughtful.

The sound is excellent too. The buttons aren’t rubber-dome, but metal domes are synonymous with high durability, which also says this machine will last.

So what’s the use case? Leave it lying around, pull it out for a quick session when you feel like slacking off, put it back when you’re done, and wait for the next opportunity. Now that “retro handhelds” keep getting bigger and bigger, a “cheap little guy” like this is all the more precious.