I recently bought a Retroid Pocket 4 Pro, a small handheld console that’s built for emulating older games.
I loaded it up with PS2 and PS1 classics from my past, and I’ve been enjoying it a lot.
But I noticed it runs Android, which makes it hard for me to see it as anything other than a smartphone with a game controller attached.
So I wondered: If a $150 Android console can run PS2, Gamecube, and potentially even Switch games, what could my flagship phone do?
How well could my phone run the best emulators, and could I have been carting around the most portable console without ever realizing it?
I spent an afternoon playing with it to find out.
Why use a phone?
First, let’s talk about why a phone would make a great emulator. Most flagship and midrange phones are stupendously powerful for their size.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite processor in the Galaxy S25 sports an 8-core CPU, formed of two 4.32 GHz primes and six lower-powered 3.53 GHz cores.
The Adreno 830 GPU comes in at 1200 MHz, and it also has 12GB of RAM.
Those are pretty good, modest specs for a modern flagship phone, but they leave previous gaming consoles in the dust.
The PlayStation 4, launched in 2013, made do with an 8-core CPU with up to 1.6 GHz, an 800MHz GPU, and 8GB of RAM.
Yes, there’s a difference of over a decade between their creations, but it still baffles me that a device that fits into a pocket is now so much more powerful than a relatively recent device that was large enough to need to sit in front of the TV.
And really, all that power is going begging. Because scrolling YouTube Shorts doesn’t take up that much processing power, either from my phone or from me.
So why not give some of that extra power the chance to shine? Plus, I’m just plain curious.
The setup
I won’t go into specific details about how I set up each emulator and what to do, largely because I haven’t been greenlit to write thousands and thousands of words here.
But, if you’re curious, I heavily recommend you check out this guide, which covers setting up most of the emulators I’ll be testing.
I’ll be trying out emulators for the Playstation 2, Nintendo Switch, GameHub for Steam emulation, and let’s throw the recent Red Dead Redemption from Netflix onto the pile, too.
For connecting it to the TV, I’ll be using a basic USB-C hub, so I can easily hook up an HDMI cable and a charging cable at the same time.
And finally, the phones themselves. I’m going to try my Google Pixel 10 Pro, and because I have doubts about that phone’s abilities, I’m also testing a Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5.
Hardly a Pixel perfect performance
It’s fair to say this wasn’t a hugely successful test for the Pixel 10 Pro.
While it breezed through the PS2 emulation, and Red Dead Redemption Netflix worked remarkably well, it struggled massively with Switch games.
GameHub also didn’t work, with games just flat out refusing to download in the first place.
It wasn’t a huge surprise that this was the case. Google uses its own processors in the Pixel phones, and despite their flagship credentials, there have been question marks around its gaming ability.
Plus, it’s simply not as popular a chip as most others, so it’s unlikely most emulators are built with Pixel architecture in mind.
As a result, while it’s powerful enough on paper to tackle most older game consoles, it doesn’t work as smoothly in practice.
Thankfully, the Z Fold 5 performed exactly as I had imagined. It, once again, smashed its way through PS2 emulation and even took Switch emulation in its stride.
Outside of a few visual artifacts, Switch games ran as smoothly as they do on my own console.
GameHub didn’t work as expected, though, and I suspect that’s more to do with GameHub as an app than either of the phones I tested it on.
At the moment, the app is a bit of a crapshoot in terms of what works properly, and I don’t have the patience to keep trying games to see if any would actually work.
For the moment, the Steam Deck is definitely the best home for Steam games.
Is it worth it?
Speaking personally, no, it’s not worth the effort to set my phone up as an emulation station.
That’s largely because I already have all the bases covered that they could conceivably offer. I have a Steam Deck, a Nintendo Switch, and my Retroid Pocket 4 Pro.
But as a concept, it absolutely works. While PS3 and Switch emulation is a bit unstable due to still being in an early development stage, PS2 emulation and earlier consoles work extremely well.
The idea of carting around a controller to play a game portably on my phone is a bit far-fetched to me, so if you want truly portable emulation gaming, you’re better suited to investing in a purpose-built device.
But if you have an older flagship running a Snapdragon processor, there’s no reason why it couldn’t spend its retirement attached to a TV, running retro games.
Just hook it up to a USB-C hub, connect a Bluetooth controller, and set up some emulators. Add a launcher like Daijisho or EmulationStation, and you’ve just turned your phone into a solid retro console for your TV.
It can be a bit fiddly to set up, but with a little patience, it’s relatively easy to create a gaming console that’ll save you from having to dig out your old PS1 to play some retro classics. And who doesn’t love that?