PowKiddy V20

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Device Overview: PowKiddy V20

The PowKiddy V20 is a $50-to-$60 horizontal slab emulator that arrived in 2025 looking almost identical to a dozen handhelds already on the shelf. Its 3.5-inch screen, dual Switch-style analog sticks and Allwinner A133P chip put it squarely in the low-end “PS1 and 16-bit” bracket, competing directly with the Anbernic RG35XX family and the flood of R36S clones. PowKiddy positions it as an affordable all-rounder, but the more honest description is a device that reheats a familiar recipe rather than adding anything new to it. If you already own something built on the A133P, you have effectively already used a V20.

Emulation performance, generation by generation

The V20 runs the Allwinner A133P, a quad-core Cortex-A53 clocked at 1.8GHz paired with just 1GB of DDR3. This is the same silicon inside the TrimUI Smart Pro and MagicX Mini Zero 28, so its ceiling is well documented and not a mystery. Everything up to and including the 16-bit era is trivial for it: NES, Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, Master System, Genesis, SNES and Neo Geo all run at full speed under RetroArch cores like mGBA, Snes9x and Genesis Plus GX. PlayStation 1 is the device’s comfortable sweet spot through the PCSX ReARMed core, with the large majority of the library playable. Above that line things get shaky fast. Nintendo 64 via Mupen64Plus is a title-by-title gamble, PSP through PPSSPP needs frameskip and reduced resolution to hold a framerate, and Dreamcast on Flycast is the practical wall. Reviewers running Crazy Taxi saw frame dips into the single digits, and 3D-heavy PS1 games shipped with audible audio crackle out of the box. Treat Dreamcast, N64, PSP and Nintendo DS as “sometimes, with compromises,” not as headline features, whatever the marketing bullet list implies.

Screen, build and controls

The panel is a 3.5-inch IPS running 640×480, a 4:3 ratio that suits retro content and looks bright and saturated in person. There is no high refresh rate here and none is needed for this class of games. The body measures 133 x 85.3 x 23mm, a pocketable horizontal slab with removable-sticker cosmetic customization. Controls are the standard PowKiddy set: a d-pad with a slightly stiff center press but easy throws to each direction, decent face buttons, rumble, and two Switch-style analog sticks. Those sticks are plain potentiometer units, not Hall effect, so drift over time is a realistic concern and worth noting for anyone hoping to play PSP or N64 games that lean on the analog input. The rear triggers are flat, contoured reasonably, but loud and clicky in the same way the early R36S batches were. A 5000mAh cell delivers a genuine 10 hours for 2D emulation and recharges over USB-C in about 2.5 hours. There is a 3.5mm headphone jack, USB-C, USB-OTG and dual TF card slots, each taking up to 256GB.

Software and setup

Out of the box the V20 boots a stock EmulationStation front end that looks like Batocera but is, on close inspection, a half-baked custom fork; the build string does not match any official Batocera Allwinner release. The preloaded ROM curation is trimmed and alphabetized and reasonably sane, but the stock experience has real problems. The most damaging is connectivity: there is no built-in Wi-Fi, and reviewers could not get multiple USB Wi-Fi dongles to connect, which cripples netplay, scraping and online setup. One tester also could not read the bundled SD card’s contents on a desktop PC, which complicates recovery if the OS corrupts. The saving grace for A133P devices is the community. This chip is well supported by Knulli (the CFW that succeeded JELOS on Allwinner hardware) and by Batocera proper, both of which are more polished than PowKiddy’s stock image and let you build your own SD card cleanly. If you buy this device, plan on reflashing to Knulli or Batocera almost immediately rather than living with the factory firmware.

Price, value and who it is for

At a $69.99 list price the V20 is hard to defend; at its frequent $49.99 to $55 sale price it becomes merely unremarkable. The problem is not that it is bad, it is that it does nothing its rivals do not already do for the same money or less. An Anbernic RG35XX H offers a similar horizontal layout with better fit and finish, and a well-sorted R36S undercuts it. The V20 makes sense only in narrow cases: you find it heavily discounted, you specifically want dual sticks in a small horizontal shell at rock-bottom cost, and you are comfortable flashing custom firmware to route around the stock OS. Anyone who wants Wi-Fi that works out of the box, or who cares about N64 and Dreamcast, should look elsewhere. This is a competent 16-bit and PS1 machine sold into a market that is already saturated with competent 16-bit and PS1 machines.