Anbernic will open orders for the RG SP on August 5 at 6AM ET / 3AM PT, with a starting price of $65. The announcement, reported by Engadget on August 3, confirms pricing and availability for a device the company had been teasing throughout July without an official launch date or price.

The RG SP is Anbernic's third attempt at recreating the Game Boy Advance SP clamshell form factor, following the RG 35XXSP and RG 34XXSP. The new model keeps the flip-phone-style hinge but refines the package with narrower screen bezels, a premium metallic finish, refined button feel, a classic D-pad, and four color options (Anbernic).

At the center of the hardware is a 3.4-inch IPS display running at 720x480 resolution, matching the GBA SP's aspect ratio and supporting 3x pixel-perfect scaling. Pixel-perfect scaling means that original Game Boy Advance graphics render at their native resolution without blurring or distortion, since the screen's pixel count is an exact multiple of the original. The panel brightness is adjustable via a dedicated function button that also provides access to save states. Power comes from a 3,300mAh battery rated for six hours of gameplay.

The RG SP runs on Anbernic's Linux operating system and is built around the Allwinner H700 chipset, a quad-core ARM SoC that has become common in budget retro handhelds. ARM SoCs are the same class of processor that powers most smartphones, but the H700 is a lower-end chip suited to running older games through emulation rather than modern titles. With 1GB of RAM (RetroHandhelds), the device handles emulation up to PSP titles. Connectivity includes Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.2, a 3.5mm audio jack, a microSD slot, and USB-C. The Wi-Fi connection enables downloading themes, scraping box art (automatically fetching cover images for games), and tracking retro achievements, bringing online features that were absent from the earlier clamshell models.

Pricing tiers scale with storage. The base $65 configuration gives way to an $80 model with an extra 64GB of memory and a $95 variant with 128GB. Anbernic is also offering early bird pricing that can drop the starting price below $65, and a $7 discount applies to any purchase made within the first three days of availability (Engadget).

The July 25 landscape was less concrete. At that point, Anbernic had not officially announced a price or release date for the RG SP, though the device was listed around the mid-$60s at Anbernic's own store (The Gadgeteer). The August 3 Engadget report now locks in the specifics.

For buyers evaluating the RG SP against its predecessors, the improvements are incremental but deliberate. The H700 chip is competent rather than powerful; it comfortably runs 8-bit and 16-bit game libraries, handles PS1, and stretches to select PSP titles with mixed results depending on the game. The 720x480 panel at 3.4 inches is a sharp display for the price tier, and the 3x pixel-perfect scaling means original-resolution Game Boy Advance content renders cleanly without the blurriness that comes from stretching an image beyond its native size. The addition of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth gives the RG SP connectivity parity with modern retro handhelds, something the 35XXSP lacked.

The broader context here is that Anbernic has been iterating on the clamshell form factor across three generations now, and each revision has tightened the formula. The RG 35XXSP established the concept. The RG 34XXSP adjusted the screen size. The RG SP refines the build quality, adds wireless connectivity, and lands at a $65 entry point that undercuts most name-brand portable gaming devices by a wide margin. Whether the H700 has enough headroom for the device to remain viable as emulation software grows more demanding is an open question, but at this price, Anbernic is clearly targeting the impulse-buy threshold for enthusiasts who want a pocketable, well-built clamshell for 8- through 32-bit game libraries.

Orders open August 5 at 6AM ET.