A week of RG DDS news put dual-screen handhelds in more than one post in five on Reddit's handheld forums

Posts naming a dual-screen device rose from 17.2% to 22.3% in r/SBCGaming and r/RetroHandhelds from 5 to 12 October. The Ayn Thor is still named most, and the new RG DDS went from zero posts to 31.

AI-drafted from 2 sources. This story was written with AI from the outside reporting listed under Sources, and checked by automated tools before it went up. The originals have the full detail.

Dual-screen handhelds took up more of the conversation on Reddit's two big handheld forums last week, and Anbernic's RG DDS is the reason. We counted posts in r/SBCGaming and r/RetroHandhelds from 5 to 12 October: 112 of 503 named at least one dual-screen device, or 22.3%, up from 80 of 464, or 17.2%, in the week from 28 September to 5 October. These are posts, not people, and a post is not a sale.

The Ayn Thor is still the device named most, in 58 posts, up from 39. The RG DDS went from no posts at all to 31 after Anbernic revealed it on 9 October, which put a brand new handheld third on the list within four days. Retroid's Pocket Duo rose from 23 posts to 29. The other names moved the other way: Retroid Pocket Nova posts fell from 59 to 36, and Anbernic's RG DS and DS Plus from 32 to 20.

What the DDS is, and what it might cost

According to Retro Handhelds, which wrote up Anbernic's reveal video on 10 October, the RG DDS looks almost identical to a New 3DS and uses a Snapdragon G2 Gen 2. It has a 4.7-inch main screen at 1,200 by 720 pixels and a 4-inch second screen at 960 by 720, both rated at 500 nits, and a 6,000mAh battery. Anbernic has given no price or release date. The site later added that an Anbernic representative in its Discord said the handheld would be "300ish with 8GB", and stressed that this is not a firm confirmation. Until Anbernic says otherwise, any price is a representative's figure passed on by reviewers.

The DDS also drew the most replies. Its 31 posts carried 2,555 comments between them, against 1,396 for the Thor's 58 posts and 1,041 for the Duo's 29. The single Reddit thread for Anbernic's announcement had 1,193 comments. Those numbers undercount: the archive records a post's comment total at the moment it collected the post, so later replies are missed, and posts from the end of the week are hit hardest. Of the 31 DDS posts, 13 went up on 9 October, 10 on 10 October, 6 on 11 October and 2 on 12 October.

How we counted

The posts come from the Arctic Shift archive of Reddit, pulled for both subreddits for each week. A script searched each post's title and text for every device's names and short forms. A post naming a device several times counts once for it, and a post naming three devices counts once for each. Exact repeats by the same author and posts removed by moderators were dropped. We read 190 matches on ambiguous names by hand, found 2 that were wrong, such as "soft brick", and excluded them. Variants are merged, so the Thor figure covers every Thor model and the Duo figure includes the Duo Lite. News weeks and buying-advice threads push a device up, which is exactly what happened to the DDS.

Sources

Image: Gaming World, data from the Arctic Shift Reddit archive

More news from Gaming World