Past experience of companies materialising out of nowhere and promising a machine that seems too good to be true should tell us this – Don’t get too excited about the handheld that PGSLabs have recently announced. If you think back to the $10 nD, the Panasonic Jungle or more recently the Smach Z then you’ll know it’s not unusual for systems such as these to simply fade into the ether.
Alarm bells immediately begin to ring with PGSLab’s PGS when you take into consideration a few points. Firstly, no-one has ever heard of these guys before. They’ve literally appeared from nowhere. Secondly, what they’re promising seems too good to be true given the $250 price point (even if that is for a Basic model). And thirdly, there is no working prototype available to show.
However, there are some more reassuring signs from this company too. Firstly, they’re not crowd funding this device – it will be funded solely by investors. Secondly, they’re actually engaging with the communities over at Dingoonity and the Pandora forums. And lastly they at least seem to know what they’re talking about.
The PGS is going to be a dual screen, dual boot Win10 and Android handheld and the basic model is supposedly going to cost $250. It will work on a sliding mechanism plus hinge, similar to the Nokia N900, but it will not have a physical keyboard on the bottom layer. The hardware is more powerful than the hardware in its closest competitor, the GPD Win, housing an Intel x7-Z8750 compared to the x5-Z8550 inside the GPD Win. In fact one of the developers got in contact with vcoleiro1 on the dingoonity forums and made this comparison between their device and the GPD Win.
GPD – is pretty well-proven team of developers of gaming systems. Although GPD WIN their first device on Windows, we have no doubt in their success. But unfortunately, in real-world gaming tests with a single-channel memory z8500 almost twice slower than z8750 with dual-channel memory. We wish them luck and hope that they will reconsider their choice about 8500.
The PGS is planned to come in 2 variants initially, a Lite version and a Hardcore version.
The developer also mentioned a little about the team, and did make reference to the fact that they’re still in their formative period.
Details about the PGS team, we can tell you later, because the team is still in the process of formation. But now I can say that every member of the team is a fan of portable gaming systems and a highly qualified specialist of his field. Our multilingual team has Americans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians and Indians. Among them, engineers, IT specialists, programmers, etc.
We very much want the community understands – we realy want to do the best thing in the portable gaming world. Quality materials, quality device. From portable gamers for portable gamers.
Pre-orders are not yet available, and given that physical prototypes are still not ready then this is a good thing. Working prototypes are said to be available around July time, and the finished product available later in the year.
For more info you can check their site and watch this highly cringeworthy video they posted on Youtube.
Thanks to shizain, Alberto and Victor for sending this in!