Today I am writing a correction post for the R36S. Poor thing, it is an unclaimed name belonging to no one's management, so various factories race to produce it, and the quality varies from factory to factory. There are dozens of screen types, whether real or clone, and that's just speaking of the genuine R36S name. Its copycat devices are countless, such as the R36XX, R36 Max, R36 Pro, K36, R36 Ultra, J36, R46S, R46H, R36H... and so on. Yet someone used AI to write a post criticizing and equating it, assuming it's absolute trash, causes eye strain, has a poor substandard disposable screen, a faulty d-pad, stiff buttons that don't register, and a waste of money. That just shows a lack of thorough on-the-ground research about it, not even owning one, just picking up things from the internet without studying how many clones it has or what mainboard it uses... lumping them all together. Most R36S units are playable; only the recent SX series has the worst quality, and I will analyze the quality of this device later.
The best generation of the R36S was in November 2024, purchased from the Boyhom or Classic Game Console factory or shop, which has extremely good quality.
A thick battery with the exact capacity of 3000mAh.
P4 V5 screen; although there might be P3 screens in this batch, the P4 is more common. This screen is as beautiful and vibrant as OLED, extremely sharp at precisely 640x480 pixels. I still keep one as a souvenir and it still runs smoothly to this day. This screen must be called the best among retro handhelds.
The refresh rate of the P4 screen is 77Hz, which causes stuttering in games, but there is a 60Hz fix for it.
The d-pad is soft enough for use, not as soft as Miyoo or Anbernic, but also very good. There is no thumb-sliding error when pressing down; just tilting the thumb makes the character stand up and run automatically. Anbernic devices might not even be this precise.
ABXY and other buttons are not as great as other expensive devices.
The transparent plastic casing is of high quality, making the device look gorgeous. It is produced in bold colors like orange, burgundy, transparent pink, emerald green, transparent blue. Collecting these color variants is truly a hobby.
The mainboard has the capability to be modded for rumble. You just need to buy a 15K rumble motor and install it to feel the vibration while playing Resident Evil or other games that support rumble, but it requires game support, appropriate emulator cores, and adjustments in pcsxrearm or Duckstation.
Capable of installing all sorts of firmware from different developers to test and tinker; extremely high tinkering potential.
Can install PortMaster to play port games, read stories, and even attach a USB Wi-Fi adapter to watch videos on Bilibili, use Kodi, YouTube, play Java games, etc.
The memory card quality of this generation is the U3 black card, which is quite durable. Even after 2 years, mine still works and has a very high write speed.
The second quality level of Real units is the R36S box labeled Game Master, but the quality is not as good as the Boyhom version. The components are manufactured from the same place, but the memory card quality is inferior with slow read speeds. If you are unlucky, it will break right upon receipt, and the read/write speeds are quite annoying, so you should replace it with a good memory card.
R36S units from Game Master (Real, though there are fake Game Masters) mostly feature the P4 V5 screen if purchased around late 2024 to early 2025.
After that, many spin-off devices of the Real version were spawned, such as the R36H and R36XX, with quality similar to the R36S, but the Boyhom version is the best.
Later on, even more different R36S clone mainboards were spawned. The quality of these early-generation clones is quite good, such as the R36Max and K36 Kinhan, which are devices with good thick batteries.
As for later R36S clones, the quality is lower: poor plastic shell quality, noticeably thinned batteries rated at only 2000 or 2500mAh but labeled as 3500mAh, duller screens, an odd 58Hz screen refresh rate that causes stuttering, dizziness, and discomfort in games. Although it can be adjusted, the gaming feel is unsatisfying.
Stiff d-pad with potential diagonal input errors depending on the unit; clone quality is inconsistent because it is made by many factories.
Cannot be modded for rumble no matter how many methods I tried.
The screen of the R36Max clone is also somewhat nice but has a slight green tint, while later clones with the G80C mainboard have duller colors.
The most frightening ones are fake R36S units using a dual-core chip like the SF3000, even running the H.os 1.2 firmware of the SF3000.
And most recently, from late 2025 to early 2026, an extremely annoying fake R36S emerged: the GA36-MA Ver 1.0 1.1, with the mainboard version 1.2 released in April 2026. Its ancestral fake predecessor is the R36S fake with mainboard version 2.5/2.7 released in early 2025 running the H.OS 1.2 operating system.
I bought 2 units. Fearing that the 20,000-game version would be problematic, I bought the 40,000-game version, which turned out even worse. The 20K game version came with a 16GB card, and the 40,000-game version came with a 32GB card. PS1 and PSP games are extremely numerous, but they are extremely stripped-down CHD versions with all videos removed. It fools people into thinking there are 40,000 games, but in reality, they are low-capacity duplicated NES games. It randomly renames games into garbage titles with random numbers and adds them, significantly degrading the device quality due to all the junk.
The screen is very nice, but it stutters, probably locked at a standard 58Hz. When I configured Retroarch to adjust settings for smooth 58Hz playback, the device froze and required a reboot. After rebooting, the audio crackled due to the 58Hz synchronization—a bug in the architecture of the MIPS-programmed dual-core chip. In short, no matter how you play, it stutters, and if it doesn't stutter, the audio crackles.
I haven't had the chance to test if the battery life is durable, but the battery itself looks nice.
The exterior plastic appearance is decent, but not as high quality as the real R36S from November 2024.
The stiff d-pad requires force to press diagonally for playing Contra, but it does not malfunction.
The memory card is extremely poor with ultra-slow read and write speeds. When I tried to dump it into a file to fix it, after reaching 12GB, the memory card officially died due to continuous read/write operations and overheating. It's absolute trash, and I had to return both devices to the manufacturer.
Who knows what kind of dual-core it uses, perhaps an Allwinner A33, but it has zero relation to the RK3326. Playing heavy PSX games like Tekken 3 or Bloody Roar 2 lags instantly, and don't even dream about PSP because it is super laggy.
After that, I proceeded to fix the image file uploaded by Le Hoang Vu; okay, it was fixed, and I could copy more games, but the partition could not be expanded. Expanding the partition caused a boot loop at the logo. Later, I downloaded another dump file of just a few gigabytes, and this image allowed expansion.
The price of taking out a good memory card to tinker with the R36S is that when using this card to copy games for customers later, the card's structure gets corrupted by this junk R36S. It wipes all partitions, and formatting it to FAT32 to copy data for a Trimui results in a black screen and failure to boot. Consequently, I had to spend a short while figuring out how to fix it—what a completely useless R36S device.
However, this machine is absolute trash and should not be bought, folks. Low-quality Android devices are okay to use, but a junk Android device that also impersonates an iPhone has super low quality. Therefore, it's better to buy a weak device that actually plays well than to buy a weak device that tricks people by pretending to be a good one.
It's a pity for a device with quite neat exterior and interior design, yet equipped with such garbage memory card. If only the memory card were slightly decent like the SF3000 (the SF3000 uses a quality memory card—I won't vouch for its durability, but its read/write speeds jump up to 50–60 MB/s, making game copying extremely fast), it could salvage some points. And if its operating system didn't impersonate ArkOS, didn't lock the card to annoy users, and didn't copy junk games to artificially inflate the number to 20,000 or 40,000 games, I would accept it using the H.os 1.2 operating system like the 2025 mainboard version 2.7 R36S. Then one could say this fake R36S is actually worth buying.
Source: Le Huy (collected because the admin also owns this R36 Pro series)
