all right guys so about six months ago i came across a crowdfunded campaign
on indiegogo for an android-based handheld gaming console i saw some potential especially for retro
gaming through emulators so i decided to make contribution the thing is with indiegogo it's
basically where you would go uh if you had a great idea that you wanted people to help you bring to
life if you do know anything about crowdfunding campaigns though you'd know that these things
aren't always guaranteed to work out at that point too the campaign was supposedly nearing
completion so i was able to see some working models with everything that's been going on around
the world their original plan to ship these out was a no-go but communication between the team
and contributors like me has been amazing they started shipping them out a couple months ago
and i finally received my own copy yesterday without wasting any more time i decided to see
what was inside of the package the company that brought this project to life is called ein and
they decided to name the console after a norse god so odin so i went for the odin pro there's
three different ones the odin pro odin bass and odin light so i went for the pro as well as a
super pac version of it which includes all kinds of accessories so it's the maximum perk you can go
for and it goes for about 459 canadian dollars but you know including shipping and taxes it came down
to about 567 canadian dollars for me the first thing i got out the box was the super dock so
it's a 15 in one super dock which we'll look into later then we have some travel adapters for when
you want to use the console on the road as well as the usb c to usbc cable there's also some earbuds
with this perk hdmi cables and you know some power adapters so 18 watts and 65 watt power adapters
as well as a travel pouch if you want to bring it around or protect it you know so let's see
what's inside the actual packaging which is pretty nice i have to say so it's a really nice packaging
they've got going on here which i really think is good for you know starter company on the back of
the packaging there's also some specs so the model the storage the ram the battery size color and all
of that so i did notice a few mistakes immediately like the storage and ram values are swapped
as well as the battery being labeled as 5 000 milliamperes when it's supposed to be 6 000
milliamperes because all the pro models are supposed to come with the maximum amount of
battery power it also says the battery size is 6 600 milliamperes on the website so i'm not really
sure which one it is okay let's see what's inside the actual console package so a user's manual and
then the console wrapped in a simple plastic wrap i went for transparent whites there's different
variations you can choose from i think about six of them i don't know but it kind of gives me that
feeling of like holding a playstation portable so that was my favorite portable console as a
kid so having this just kind of takes me back there's also a usb type-c to type a cable inside
the package the first thing i did was try out the thumbsticks the buttons all of that cool stuff and
the d-pad was a little squiggly but i think it's fine for me you know i didn't really feel like
it was too bad for 63 dollars you can also add the dock to your order which is pretty cool because it
does a lot more than what it's worth i'm actually really digging the design of the you know bag the
travel bag it's pretty tough on the outside so it seems like it can withstand you know drops
or any kind of you know impact which is pretty cool inside the travel bag there's also the hard
shell case which is really useful if you want to protect your odin console even further so
it's pretty cool i threw it on immediately and i turned on the console so the first thing upon boot
you see is their logo and you know kind of their intro for the console so the odin kind of pops up
on there the setup was pretty quick and pretty straightforward nothing crazy just you know the
usual connect internet and all you know the work set up your time zone and whatever so you have
to select a launcher at the start as well so i set up with my regular android launcher you can
always use the odin launcher as well which we'll get to eventually you'll see that it's a more
simplified uh launcher for launching games and apps and whatnot one way to picture this console
is like an android phone that's been stripped and wrapped with game console buttons and all of that
stuff at this point it's pretty much ready to go all you need to do at this point is decide how you
want to use it the possibilities are endless but you can play android games with it if you enjoyed
playing mobile games you can also game through streaming so using xbox game pass for example
there's also emulators which you can download to play playstation portable ps1 ps2 gamecube 3ds all
those cool retro games you can play them on here through emulators the first thing i wanted to test
on this was the ability to play retro games on it because that was the main reason why i bought it
so i decided to hit the play store and pick up some emulators so they're free not all of them
are free but i picked up some free ones so psp emulator as well as ps2 emulator the next thing
i did was copy my psp and ps2 roms directly from my pc into a tf card so i've got a 32 gigabyte
tf card here but you can use up to one terabyte with this console which is pretty sick right there
for expansion file transfers can be done directly using the usbc cable as well once you connect the
emulator to the folder in which the games have been copied to you have access to them that's
about as much work as it takes to start playing retro games on this thing so i really love that
fact i love how smooth and easy the process is five seconds later nostalgia took over and i
was playing one of my favorite games of all time god of war ghosts of sparta so this is one of my
favorite games on the psp and i don't know about you guys but it feels really really good to be
playing that again on you know a similar console or something that's handheld as well the way it
handled ghost of sparta was really i was really amazed to be honest with you guys everything was
working very well there was no issues at all i was really you know reliving my childhood through this
game and through this little console right here shortly after i decided to get a playstation 2
emulator so i can play some of my favorite games from that era so my favorite or at least one of
my favorites was one of rockstars games bully so i immediately downloaded that to try it out and
see how well it would handle on the console and surprisingly it actually handled it pretty well
the hardware is pretty nice it's got a really nice weight to it that doesn't you know make you feel
like this thing is cheaply built as for dimensions it's 224 millimeters wide it's 95 millimeters tall
and 15 millimeters thick on the front side of the console there's the mic the analog joystick
l3 the d-pad the analog joystick r3 the start and select buttons a b x and y buttons as well as a
home button on the top side of the console there's the analog r1 and r2 analog l1 and l2 the tf card
slot and hdmi input as well as an on and off button volume plus and minus button and two one
watt speakers underneath the console there's the audio jack as well as usb type c for charging and
for connecting to a pc or a macbook there's also two buttons on the back side of the console as
well as a fan so the m1 and the m2 button so the fan is how it you know actively cools the console
there's also a passive cooling through a heatsink it's got a full hd 1080p six inch touchscreen
that you know i think is just right for gaming on a handheld device the transparent versions
don't come with led lights on the thumbsticks as well as on the side so this is a transparent one
and it doesn't have those features as for the super dock there's a lot you can do with it i
mean it's a 15 and one super dock so it's got a type c for inputting or connecting your old in
directly to the dock on the front side it's got two n64 controller interfaces for using
your retro controllers it's also got five usb 3.0 ports so two on the front side and three on
the back side on the back side there's also a gigabit ethernet port for you know connecting
uh to the internet using hardwire there's also a hdmi interface which allows you output 4k or 2k
at up to 60hz type c input also for powering the device on either side of the dock there's also
two gamecube controller interfaces you can also take off a plate on the backside to expose a 2.5
inch sata hdd drive spot here's a quick rundown of the entire specs for the pro edition so it's
got a cpu that's a qualcomm snapdragon sd845 a 64-bit processor not the latest snapdragon chip
but it will do so the gpu is an adreno 630 it's got 8 gigabytes of ddr4 ram and as for storage i
opted for an extra so an upgrade from the standard 128 gigabytes that's usually on the pro model so i
added another 128 to make up 256. it's also got tf card support so you can use a memory card with it
and finally it supports 2.4 and 5g wifi as well as bluetooth and quick charge i don't know why
the light model has some better features than the bass and the pro model but that might just
be because it's coming out the last bass on the pro might just get these in updates you
can also install other gsi compatible android roms as well as windows on this thing which is
pretty cool right there for tinkerers i've got it side by side right next to my nintendo switch all
that here so some of you guys that have an oled can kind of get an idea of what this thing would
feel like or what it would look like next to a switch the more you increase the brightness of the
screen the more power it consumes that's pretty much standard you can also select between three
performance modes so the standard performance and high performance and all these do is optimize your
console for different gaming scenarios there's also three options you can select for the fan
for active cooling so quiet mode to keep it quiet sports mode to drive it into overdrive
and then smart mode to select based on the game or the way the console is feeling you can connect an
external controller to it using bluetooth so all you have to do is pair it i've got a dual shock 4
right here that i've sent into you know bluetooth pairing mode and i'm just going to hook it up to
the odin console so it's a very simple process all you got to do is pair it up and you're good to go
it recognizes it and it becomes the controller for the console there's some games that it just feels
better to play using a controller for example mortal kombat unchained right here for me i
love to play with the controller like an external controller when you're using the emulators you can
also map your controller or the odin's controller very easily using the settings menu for me that's
huge because i like to play certain games using you know certain button configurations that i'm
already used to there's also the option of gaming on a larger screen using the dock so you can hook
it up use an hdmi cable and power it on using usbc and then you go ahead and output 4k or 2k video
using usbc right there so that only works with the pro edition you can't do that with the light
the usbc method of output and video didn't work for me the first time so i decided to try out a
different way to output it in 1080p by connecting directly to the console connecting directly worked
immediately and i don't know why it didn't work when i did it using the dock to output over usbc
but i'm going to test it out further and see what could be the problem it could easily be the hdmi
cable maybe it's the wrong type that i'm using or something like that or it could just be you know
a missed step either ways i'm going to figure out what the issue was and i'm going to get it to work
but so far even just using 1080p seems to work very well everything worked great it wasn't full
screen but maybe that's to do with a setting as well the odin launcher makes the console more like
a handheld console so it gives you a simplified menu for accessing all of your different apps
and your gaming it's best used by people that want to avoid you know dealing with the android
interface and want to use the console just like a console as opposed to like a pc or a phone
so you can launch whatever you want from there you just got to set it up and you know add whatever
you want to add to that launcher you can enable auto rotate which allows you to switch between
a horizontal and a vertical orientation so this allows you to use it just like you would a phone
so say you have facebook and you want to use that app on here you could do that as well so after
depleting the battery to about 25 it took me about an hour and a half to get it back to about 85
so i'll estimate between two hours to three hours for a full charge from zero percent
for charging i use the 65 watt power adapter there's also an 18 watt power adapter which i
think comes standard and it's the one that you're actually supposed to use the hard shell case has a
decent build and honestly it makes holding onto the console a lot easier i don't know it maybe
it's just me but it feels a lot easier to hold on and you know push the buttons with the hard
shell case on there apart from retro gaming i've also been using this console for some xbox cloud
gaming so i use my gamepad subscription on my pc and my xbox console on here just directly i just
go cloud and i play off of wi-fi at one point i also used my phone to provide cellular data for
the console so i can play you know without being connected to wi-fi and it worked pretty well as
well i'm gonna end up testing out this feature a lot further because i'm very interested in cloud
gaming because that's like the ultimate you know way to game because you just have to deal
with zero updates and you can continue exactly where you stopped on any of your consoles you
know anywhere so that's pretty cool right there there's also ps remote play i haven't tested that
out yet but i'm pretty sure it's going to work well on this console i'll talk about those more
after about a month or two of really using this console although i prefer to use headphones or
earphones while gaming with handhelds but you know the speakers on this thing aren't even that bad
if you enjoy playing mobile games as well you're going to love this because it actually handles
those very well so i've been playing games like call of duty as well as gen shin impact on this
console and no performance issues whatsoever just smooth sailing all the way the travel bag
is very nice and very useful for tucking away the console if you don't want to use it or if
you want to bring it on a trip so it's designed specifically for it and it fits perfectly in there
i really love it actually you know i haven't had it that long i've only had it for about 24 hours
and in that time i've been putting it to great use i've already installed a bunch of my favorite
playstation portable games as you can already see right there so need for speed was one of my
favorite games to play on the console most wanted especially man where did all the good games go
the biggest thing for me with this console is the value for money so it's inexpensive
at least as far as i'm concerned and it has the potential to do so much you know i want
to actually commend iron for bringing this thing to life for a crowdfunded campaign i didn't really
expect much matter of fact i expected it to not do well or just to be some kind of flimsy device
but they've kind of blown my mind so far like i said i've only had it for about 24 hours but
you know there's more time to mess around with this i'm going to be trying a lot of
things with it i'm the kind of guy that you give something that's open source and
i'll kind of just take it and run with it i'd like to know what you guys would do with this
console if you had one so would you choose to go to route of playing retro games only
or would you choose to play mobile games or cloud gaming or even you know removing the entire os and
replacing it with windows so that's it for me on this video my first 24 hours using the odin pro
android gaming handheld console i will be back again in about a month or two with a proper review
you know like one after using it for a little bit if you did make it to this part of the video make
sure to comment hashtag retro gaming down in the comment section and go ahead and give the video
a like make sure to subscribe if you're new to the channel turn on notifications if you know you want
to be notified whenever i drop new videos but that's it i'm out i'll catch you guys next time