The handheld aficionados over at Retro Dodo have recently brought another new handheld to our attention. The Auspicious Machine is a Chinese-developed handheld built for portable gaming that draws inspiration from Blackberry phones for its design.
The device was announced last week on Chinese social media, but thanks to the Retro Dodo writer Anthony Wallace (and Google Translate), we now know a little more about what the device actually is. According to their report, it is being developed by a single developer named Fugui, who plans to release the machine "soon". You can see an image of the device in the tweet below:
The machine is Linux-based, has a 3.5 inch 4:3 640×480 screen display, and has an Allwinner H616 quad-core processor. From their analysis, Retro Dodo expects it will be able to emulate at least up to the 32-bit era of gaming.
What's most interesting about the handheld is the presence of a QWERTY keyboard and trackball, two features commonly seen on models of Blackberry phones. It's not expected that the device will also function as a mobile phone, so it remains to be seen how much players will be able to get out of these features for retro gaming. The device also features pins on the top for open-source development and an SD slot visible on the side. It is already available to preorder for ¥1656 (roughly $240), with the strange device expected to come out sometime in 2023.