But then smartphone gaming turned into a barren hellscape of ads and fremium mtx ridden slop. I don’t know about you, but despite owning high end smartphones I have literally no games on my phone.

this is the real shame imo. I don't want another pocketable device, I just want decent games on the thing I already have.

GameBoy SP was the perfect handheld. It fit easily in your pocket. It had color. It had a backlight. Everything after is just chasing screen size.

JNCO Jeans enters the chat

There’s a whole market of pocketable handhelds where you can carry around 40 years of retro gaming. Retroid, Miyoo, AYANEO.

There are others that run Android, giving you access newer mobile games on a dedicated device with physical buttons.

I’d argue that, in 2026, pocketable mobile gaming is better than it has ever been.

My pockets are big enough to carry a Steam Deck 🤷‍♂️

Suggestion: Wear bigger pants. 😌

My Steam Deck lives in my backpack and yes, i would have taken it to the airport.

For phones I recommend emulators. Games from 30 years ago were less likely to have microtransactions, DLC, and all that bullshit

My kid is a Nintendo Game Boy Advanced SP connoisseur. I've looked into modern versions like the Miyoo, but after getting two broken in a row trying to get a Christmas present together I gave up. GBA-SP still works thpugh!

Others have covered various points with better words than I can, so I'm going to share a website that is covering mobile phone games releases. not affiliated in any way

https://minireview.io/

Is was developed and maintained by a youtuber covering mobile games. Although he haven't uploaded to youtube in a year. And I don't usually check the site so it could be outdated.

And I see mobile ports of pc games are taking more care in translating physical controls to touch screen controls. Still not the rule and definitely the exception, but it is out there. Latest one I remember off the top of my head is balatro and ballxpit.

I love the new crop of boutique handhelds, but I too will always miss being able to trade Pokémon with other kids on the bus and not having to worry about anything except who’s got a link cable. As well the ecosystem of magazines and parts and accessories that came with these things. It is the community and adoption level that made it special.

And to those who say this is nostalgia talking this was true back then as well, just look at things like the Supervision. Lack of support and community is part of why it failed and I fear that many of these new handhelds will meet a similar fate.

Big time agree. I still have 3 N3DS XL's, a PSP (all jailbroken), and an Anbernic. I never take my Steam Deck or any of my Switches with me, but sometimes I just throw a 3DS in my pocket. Sucks that there are no more streetpass relays, but somebody at the japanese market near me keeps their 3DS at the register, and I like to think there's a subculture of people like me who bring their 3DS's to streetpass each other there.

There are a shit ton of handhelds ranging from a lot of budgets, wulffden made a great video about any that he could get his hands on.

Edit: Should have finished reading before I started talking, I see you already know about these emulation handhelds. I'll still leave the link up for anyone curious.

Yo they exist, android based handhelds that can run steam games and are more portable, I very much considered dropshipping them (never did it in my life, just seemed like a good pick) pretarrif because of how cheap they were for the performanxe.

Another big issue with smartphone gaming is platform decay. The stores require you to constantly update or your game gets kicked off. There are tons of great games that have no legit way to play them, and others are completely lost with no backups existing. I have some games on my phone I can't delete without risking losing access to them altogether.

Meanwhile I can go put rhythmn heaven in my gba and play it right now.

Agreed and I’d make an argument that Nintendo could change this in a heart beat. Switch 2 lite mini would go a long way. Even the Switch 1 lite only half way does the job. Much smaller but you lose some game operability and still kind of to big. I’d love a clamshell NS 2 with an 6.7 inch screen.

I think the audience is far to small and likely the chipset changes from the existing structure might be to costly .. if possible at all ..

But this one particular idiot (me) on Lemmy can dream..

All of this could be so easily fixed if only we had linux phones. I'd like to just have my entire steam/gog/itchio libraries just on my phone as I've already bought those games and I should be able to just play them on the devices I already own.

I am late to this thread but I upgraded from my almost 20 year old DS Lite with an R4 card to an AYN Thor which I genuinely recommend since a good quality New 3DS may run you about the same money. Go for 3DS if you have friends who still use DS/3DS.

Skip the 2 screen thing

No need, AYN proved your entire idea with the Thor with both screens as AMOLED. The base model is going for $330, so its absolutely possible. I would even bet it could take a solid chunk of the Switch 2 library despite a weaker GPU, and it can definitely do Switch 1 games and lots of Steam games.

The one downside with Thor is that there is no DS/3DS wireless local multiplayer (yet) because of latency shenanigans which is something I actually want to work on but haven't had the time to do. The upside tradeoff is that you can play modern steam and switch games on it as well, both in Android and Linux (Rocknix). It is a very well made console despite the smaller audience of 3rd party consoles. And community is actually decently sized with lots of cutsom launchers, themes, addons, styluses, cases, etc.

Nintendo had some of the greatest technology in their hand with stuff like streetpass and download play, yet they threw it all away for the Switch era which effectively killed the handheld multiplayer scene. I think I only used my switch in local wireless multiplayer once ever. Everything else was either smash bros or split screen mariokart. As you said, it's just a home console that's portable.

This might sound dumb, but I don't want to see current Nintendo pursue a proper handheld again because I know they are not capable of doing so in the same manner that the DS and 3DS was successful. They have been making absolute bank on Switch and Switch 2 sales despite paywalling stuff that used to be included for free in the DS/Wii era and removing the core essentials of what made those consoles so good.

They could have easily repurposed those ideas for their mobile games, but they didn't. Instead we just got more paywalled slop despite having access to new tech like NFC, Bluetooth, WiFi Aware, gyro in every phone, etc. Even Pokemon GO was a 3rd party reskin, not a Nintendo original game.

A proper successor to the 3DS could absolutely shred the market, but I just don't see Nintendo doing it correctly.

Get bigger pockets

There are still plenty of pocketable handhelds out there.

Aren't there a few chinese companies that make highly portable machine for emulation.

This could be blamed on game developer brain drain. These are low-powered devices, and they need people writing game logic to have some idea of hardware-level efficiency, not let a 500-feature engine do the work for them.

There’s no way to remake these devices without them taking up oodles of power, thus burning a hole in your pocket. Phones come close (it’s damn impressive what visuals Gacha games can achieve on phones) but even they are losing efficiency with time.

I really wanted to respond to this immediately, but I had to gather my thoughts.

In general, I agree. We lost something. But the issue is that in the corporate world the mobiles cannibalized this.

A mobile is capable of gaming, of course. Even leaving download, microtransactions and gacha aside, the controls and the OS are suboptimal regarding this.

Of course mobile fans will say get used to touchscreen (I admire people successfully playing dead cells on there) and you could just pair a controller. Well, partly true.

It massively takes from the just play simplicity especially of consoles. I want it to just work (like putting a game in switch or plugging vr into ps5 vs pc/derivates).

For me the peak was foldable console gaming, GBA SP, Nintendo DS and 3DS (while psp and vita were also great).

We lost the - as op said - pocketability of a console gaming system, all included and hassle free ready to go and just working as is.

The Vita rest mod is godly. Two weeks later, you’ve maybe lost a quarter of charge. Switch will have been dead for a while.

my steamdeck fits in one of the inside pockets of my punk vest lmao. it's nice

What's mtx?

PC with Sunshine, and Moonlight on your phone?

You can even get a mini Bluetooth controller or use a full size controller with a holder that holds your phone.

Plenty of decent games on Android, but the experience of platforms like Google Play, Itchio and Humble Bundle is abysmal. Google Play pushes this slopfest iirc since Android 2 at least. Itchio has too much noise and too little browsing filters. Humble Bundle you'd be lucky to find a game with a notice that is too old and likely won't work on modern devices, the rest being kinda just there, forgotten.

For me at least, the best you can get out of a phone is emulation and source ports. But without a dedicated controller, experience can be rather cumbersome while playing too. In fact, a small tangent to show the point, the ebook reader I most prefer is a PS Vita homebrew simply because it is made to use physical controllers and works fantastic at that while not having to have the fingers cover parts of the page, even if the reader itself may take literal seconds to load the next page.

But besides that, I also miss the novelty of a portable console, or even from any consoles before they became somewhat standardized glorified boxes. The absolute unit that is the Saturn, the (truly) slim PS2 and the PSP whose loudness helps greatly at troubleshooting while their libraries do the most for their hardwares' quirkiness, the DS, 3DS and Wii having multiple screens for reasons, whatever Sony was going for with the PS Vita but that worked out fantastic (plus it was still relatively small)...

Meanwhile, the Switch and NS2 are rather basic, clinging to brand name, some exclusives, and barely having competition. But things like positioning them on a degree to play I can do with any no-brand screen, general library there are those portable Linux devices and stretching a bit the Raspberry Pi, and so on, and tinkering with these devices, not being as standard, brings some of the novelty back.

Besides, back at the initial point, I've seen console-like PCs a bit smaller than a Vita, like the R36S, making for a nice portable and pocketable experience. Though these are from my experience just powerful enough for retrogaming, which would lock you out past a certain point in time. So at least for now, I think those handheld PCs should do as replacement, but I would for sure gaming hardware to go back to that more novel and pocketable way.

I'm pretty sure someone made pants to make the Steam Deck or similar pocketable...

Jokes aside, if they were pocketable, you couldn't run modern AAA games on them, then gamers would non-stop whine about it. You can still get some pocketable handhelds with Android OS (or a Chinese fork of it), and likely that will be my next portable device if Google will go through with closing down the Android ecosystem, and my S23 Ultra will go bad.

I adore my RETROID Pocket Flip v2

i had the latest 3ds when they forced the pokemon games to switch, that was my last console owned, made the right decision since pokemon has only enshittfied further.

You’ve got small pockets

I think you're simply nostalgic. Not in a bad way. In an understandable way.

Even though we have a switch, steam deck, bazzite machine, wife remote plays her steam cozy simulators on pocket flip 2 and she's fairly happy with it

Locally she installed gameNative (emulator of steam on android) and uses it for lighter visual novels

All is to say, maybe the day you finally get the old school style console, you'll change your mind.

I think the sooner thing that will happen is that handhelds like the Ayn Odin will come with Linux instead of Android, and then Proton will work, giving you all the Steam games (where there's a very active community.)
Some people have gotten it working, but I'm hoping this becomes the norm.
https://retrogamecorps.com/2025/03/03/linux-on-the-odin-2-rocknix-guide/

I think it was smart phones which killed the handheld market, but the switch matches your usecase well and there are plenty of handheld devices on aliexpress (usually emulators.) However you might be giving the games that worked on small screens a little too much credit. They were good for what they were at the time, but hand helds were mostly good for puzzle like games, and a lot of platformers did work in a severely cut down fashion.

TBH laptops becoming a dominate platform probably had a major impact too on handheld devices.

But I do strongly agree with the touched upon idea that graphics and 3d platformers/fps has been a major cause of the general decline of diversity in gaming, in a way that even impacts indie. It feels like make design itself has decided there isn't anything better than a FPSRPG.