A Few Days with Odroid Go

The Odroid Go is a handheld project built around a dev board that you assemble yourself. In theory it’s open source, and you could put one together entirely by hand. Of course, someone also sells you a finished kit, and I happened to catch it on sale, so I ordered one.

It arrived as a single registered mail envelope, but there was quite a lot inside.

What you get is a pile of parts you have to put together yourself: the battery, the shell, the buttons, the rubber pads, and so on.

Assembly isn’t much trouble. Actually, it’s pretty simple. Two halves of a shell, stuff everything inside, done.

Unless you’ve got two left hands, you’ll have it put together in no time, and it looks decent.

Then you turn it on and there’s nothing there…

You need a MicroSD card, then flash the system onto it.

Personally I’d upgrade the firmware first. The method is documented on the site, and there’s a way to do it from both Windows and Linux:

https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid_go/firmware_update

After the firmware upgrade you still need a MicroSD card for the software you want, most of which is emulators…

Personally I’d grab this all-in-one bundle:

https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=159&t=31716

You need to format the card as FAT, set up the proper “skeleton folders,” drop the apps in, then hold the “B” button while powering on to boot it.

There are plenty of pretentious-looking apps on there, but the only ones with any real use are the emulators…

After playing for a while it feels good. The sound is okay, the controls feel nice, and the battery life is ridiculous. The official claim is 10 hours, which crushes the Retro Game. But… apart from those strengths, everything else is a weakness.

First, the emulator performance is poor. I played “Dark Wing” (Darkwing Duck), an NES emulator, and there was noticeable frame dropping. Damn. Maybe the CPU in this thing is just too weak. Or maybe the weak CPU is exactly why the battery lasts so long?

Then, even dumber: the emulators support too few games. The classic “64 in 1” won’t even run, and plenty of games throw weird graphical glitches for no reason…

These issues have been raised by quite a few people in the official firmware development, and the team is constantly fixing them, but the pace is still too slow.

Some YouTuber was hyping this thing as “the most perfect handheld right now.” I’ll admit it feels good in the hand, the battery is great, and it’s nicely compact, but… you have to make sure the games you want to play are supported, without bugs or glitches. Otherwise… it’s just a toy and a display piece waiting for an update.