When this North Carolina man saw a $20 phone being sold on TikTok that could allegedly handle PS3 games, he knew he had to try it.
Like a lot of us, he couldn’t stand touchscreen controls for gaming and preferred real buttons under his thumbs.
So when a viral listing promised a ‘gaming dumb phone,’ curiosity did what it always does and won, and he was very quickly $20 poorer.
What arrived looked less like a phone and more like a chunky budget PSP.
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A $20 phone on TikTok that claimed to play PS3 games
When this tech fan saw a strange listing on TikTok for a ‘gaming dumb phone’ that you could play PS3 games on, he knew he had to try it out to maybe recover some nostalgia from his childhood for just $20.
When he unboxed it, the first surprise was the size.
The ‘phone’ was massive compared to a normal handset, yet strangely lightweight, with a D-pad, number pad, and a screen protector that looked anything but premium.
Inside, it packed a 2500mAh battery, which honestly wasn’t terrible for something that cheap.
But there was a major catch: it only supported 2G, meaning it couldn’t realistically function as a proper phone in many places.
When he powered it on, the startup volume blasted out at an absurd level, and he discovered the built-in FM radio actually worked.
The smart features didn’t impress him, however.
The camera quality was awful, video recording required a memory card, storage was tiny at just 128MB, and apps like WhatsApp failed to connect since there was no Wi-Fi and only basic SIM-based connectivity.
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It was a total mess
The big selling point had been the claim of 201 games.
But once he started playing, things fell apart fast.
NES classics like Super Mario ran at painfully low frame rates with heavy slowdown that made levels uncomfortable to watch.
Contra was included, too, and he even managed to activate a cheat code for extra lives, but performance remained terrible.
The game list was a strange mix of renamed classics, bootleg-style titles, and a handful of basic phone games like Snake, which also ran slowly.
By the end, he opened the device up to see what was inside.
Parts came away easily, the screen appeared to be soldered directly to the board, and there were empty chip spaces that suggested cost-cutting.
In the end, the $20 phone clearly couldn’t play PS3 games, and it barely managed to handle the retro titles it actually came with.
It seemed to put the ‘dumb’ in ‘gaming dumb phone’.
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