The Devterm is a portable computer from Clockworkpi, modeled on the TRS-80, the first mass-produced personal computer in history. Not a 1:1 replica of course — a shrunk-down one. The full specs are on the official site, go look for yourself. Here’s a quick rundown of the config I bought: the A06 high-end core, which is really an RK3399 with 4G RAM and Bluetooth/Wi-Fi built in. As far as this device goes, that’s the top spec you can get. By the way, the core slots in as a module over a DDR2-SODIMM 200-pin interface, which means you can swap in other compatible cores yourself. I asked the official folks whether things like a Banana Pi or Orange Pi would work. They didn’t say Yes and didn’t say No — just that they only provide system compatibility for official hardware. Which I read as “it might run, but if there are driver problems, that’s your problem.” I bought this thing on impulse. I wanted a portable text-input device, ideally one you can hold with both hands. You might say plenty of mini Windows laptops can do that, but I don’t think they’re coool. Nothing is coooler than something like the Devterm, so on a whim I dropped 1600 on a top-spec, unopened unit on Xianyu.

In recent years the term “open-source handheld” has basically drifted away from what it originally meant. Originally “open-source handheld” referred specifically to retro handhelds running open-source systems. Some were commercial products flashed with third-party firmware, like the early Subor RG97; others were open by design from the start, like the later Odroid Game series. But what comes to mind now when someone says “open-source handheld”? Generic molds, RK3566 SoCs, and a pile of messy emulators. Lately Android comes standard. Never mind whether the shell infringes on anyone’s design—the SoC’s own attitude toward the open-source community is questionable. That’s why overseas these products were never called “Opensource Handheld” but “Retro Handheld.” A handheld for playing retro games, so retro handheld. Makes sense. Today I’m talking about two retro handhelds you could call “closed-source handhelds”: the RG35XX from Anbernic (Zhou-ge), and the Miyoo Mini Plus from Miyoo, Zhou-ge’s nemesis.

Preface: my history of buying Windows handhelds The first Windows handheld I bought was probably back in 2015 — also the industry’s first Windows handheld, the first-generation GPD Win. I backed it on Indiegogo. Honestly, I knew it was made by a company in Shenzhen, China, but I had no idea it would later go on sale in the domestic market. I paid in converted USD, and the shipping date was half a year out. What happened next a lot of people probably know already: GPD brought the machine into mainland China, put it up for preorder on JD.com, created a Discord group, and kicked off all kinds of shameless marketing. I was in the first batch of people to join the Discord group, and I even added the two founders on Discord — one was “Wangcai,” the other “Lao Zhu.” I told them I was an Indiegogo backer but physically in mainland China, so could they just ship domestically. Lao Zhu said no problem, and sent it by SF Express. The machine arrived quickly and I wrote a short review. I was actually fairly satisfied with it — mainly because it was small and had everything you’d expect. There were some QC issues, but nothing major. What dissatisfied me most was the screen’s severe color shift, basically no calibration, and the low resolution — a lot of Galgame couldn’t show the full picture. Later I backed the first-generation GPD Pocket. That product’s build quality was far better than the Win’s: all-metal body, genuinely nice to use as a tiny computer. But I have to say, for performance’s sake GPD set very aggressive power limits on many of its products, which made battery life pretty poor. After that I went on to buy GPD Pocket 2 MAX, Chuwi minibook, GPD Pocket 3, and recently even picked up an Ayaneo Air Plus at a low price… So I’ve used a fair number of portable Windows devices, and they always had something unsatisfying. Even with the GPD Win, I never actually finished a single game on it — too hot, battery life too bad, and too much fiddling required. Many times I’d spend a whole day getting one game to run, and by the time it worked I’d lost interest in playing. There was a time I thought Windows handhelds — or X86 handhelds in general — would just always be like this. Then I met the Steam Deck, and it got me to finish several AAA titles, even got me willing to spend a decent chunk of money buying games on Steam. It also cemented one belief and opinion of mine: The Steam Deck is currently the only X86 handheld worth buying.

I remember once saying, angrily, that Android tablet productivity is all shit. And then I went to a Xiaomi store and tried one out, which only confirmed it. Even on the “Xiaomi Pad 5 Pro,” productivity is still a pile of shit. My biggest complaint is that the IME on Android still can’t do proper cursor-following; in a lot of cases you still get the idiotic “type up here, pick characters down there” setup. Not to mention the browser being unusable… In the end I decided to try the Chromebook Duet. I picked one up on eBay, plus a USI stylus. Bought before the price went up — the seller listed it at 50, realized the next day he’d undersold, and jacked the price up in a hurry. But I’d already bought mine.

Preface: I picked up a Pinebook Pro back around 2019. I vaguely remember the other machine I was fiddling with at the time was a Chuwi Minibook. Nearly a year and a half went by and the Pinebook Pro spent most of it collecting dust, until my ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2017 went missing a while back. I really had no computer to use, so I dug it out and used it as my “main machine” for a stretch. And honestly, when the Pinebook Pro first launched, the ecosystem around it was pretty incomplete (though already a big step up from the old Pinebook). Now that I have a new temporary main laptop, I can set the Pinebook Pro aside for the time being. The days of using it were an interesting and painful memory, but it was also a chance to seriously try out this “open-source Arm Linux laptop” and see its strengths and weaknesses. So I figure I’ve earned the right to give it a subjective review here.

The ODROID-GO Advance is the follow-up to that ODROID-GO handheld. Better performance, plus a stick and shoulder buttons. From what I gathered reading various foreign reviews, the performance is supposedly monstrous and it has a huge future ahead of it… So I bought one. It actually arrived a while ago; I just never had time to put it together, and only recently dug it out and got to work. Recording it here.

As someone who’s been out of the audiophile game for ages, I find the current enthusiast market kind of funny and kind of sad at the same time. Ever since I redirected the money I used to spend on headphones into buying music albums, I feel like my horizons have widened. “A ten-thousand-yuan IEM isn’t worth hearing ten thousand albums,” or something like that. At least I’m not like some grade-schooler on Reddit, buying insanely expensive IEMs just to listen to a music library that hasn’t been updated in years, flipping back and forth through the same dumb test tracks. Or running high-end gear to listen to doujin music produced in some low-end studio. That’s just unscientific. High-end audio gear really does work, sure. But for most people it’s useless, and for most audiophiles it’s also not much use — unless you’re a die-hard classical fan and love other large-ensemble music so much you refuse to listen to anything that isn’t a SACD from a famous studio. Then yes, high-end gear does work. But for most people like me, who listen to pop, occasionally some small-ensemble stuff, and just want to feel the charm of a melody — as long as the headphones don’t have that “boom-tss boom-tss” low-brow tuning and aren’t distorting or off-balance, that’s about enough. Yes, about enough. How do you know that the ten-thousand-yuan suit-and-tie stack you bought wasn’t used to listen to songs made by someone using a garbage 5-yuan USB cable? With that money you’re better off just listening to more music. So I’ve been increasingly abandoning wired gear and trying Bluetooth. The biggest advantage of Bluetooth is convenience. The biggest disadvantage is, naturally, sound quality. But with APTX and LDAC gradually opening up, Bluetooth has more or less reached the “listenable” stage. So I bought the FiiO BTR3 Bluetooth DAC/amp, two and a half months ago… Why did it take me this long to write up my impressions? That’s a long story.

I decided to buy a Pinebook at least a year ago, back when all the Linux news sites started covering it. Most of them called it “the $99 Linux laptop,” and sure enough it really does cost $99. But there’s nothing especially novel about it, because the so-called Pinebook is just the Pine64 dev board that was crowdfunded on Indiegogo, shoved into a laptop shell. There are already plenty of similar products out there, mostly “Raspberry Pi laptops”—a Pi stuffed into a laptop case, or a 3D-printed shell with a battery and so on. Let’s look at the main specs of the Pinebook first. 11-inch or 14-inch 1366x768 screen (11-inch is IPS, 14-inch is TN) 2 GB RAM 16GB eMMC Wi-Fi and Bluetooth MicroSD card reader USB port, headphone jack, HDMI output Nothing impressive there, and none of it is what got me interested in the Pinebook. The biggest selling point of the Pinebook—and its biggest appeal—isn’t performance. It’s that it looks good. Yes, compared to the whole flood of similar “Raspberry Pi laptops” on the market, the Pinebook is drop-dead gorgeous. Combined with the fact that it’s not expensive at all, I decided to buy one to play with. It’s cheap, and Pine64 claims to be a more advanced 64-bit ARM processor than the original Raspberry Pi (back when Pine64 was crowdfunding, the Pi was still on gen 1, if I remember right). At the very least it should make a decent toy. But I never expected that from deciding to buy it to actually holding it in my hands, it would take me a full year and more. Once the machine arrived I played with it for almost two weeks. There were pleasant surprises and disappointments. Picking up shells on the beach, sorting out my thoughts, let me sum up the sweet and the bitter for you.

I bought a Raspberry Pi before, left it powered on for half a year, and then it just up and died for no reason… Once it died I had no idea how to fix it, and I don’t think it was covered by any warranty, so it just sat there collecting dust. Recently, for certain reasons, I needed a small computer to use as a server. Originally I was thinking of buying one of those recycled thin clients, but with electronics you always buy new rather than old. The server didn’t need high performance anyway, so I just went with the newer Raspberry Pi. The latest Raspberry Pi: Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ . Compared with the previous version, the CPU is improved and the network card performance is expanded—it’s now a gigabit NIC! Sure, it’s still routed through the USB bus, but that’s better than not having it, right? The price was fairly low when I got it, and Taobao has all sorts of cheap bundles—basically a simple case and a simple heatsink, but that’s about enough. Actually, when I bought the Raspberry Pi 3, I somehow ended up contacting the Chinese general distributor. This time the distributor just ignored me, saying they don’t accept retail and telling me to find their sub-sellers on Taobao, so I had no choice but to buy on Taobao. It even came with a case that looked like a big gift pack.

This post has been updated: Check out the new firmware guide and tinkering notes: /archives/9750/ I loved handhelds as a kid, and the habit stuck. I bought a PSV, I bought a Switch, and I still enjoy just holding a handheld and fiddling with it. Recently I was bored, stumbled onto this whole open-source handheld scene online, saw a bunch of crowdfunding projects, and ultimately—because I’m broke—went with the cheap Subor Retro Game (RS97).