Did ANBERNIC quietly downgrade its GBA SP-like handheld again? Not so fast.

The RAM shortage has been impacting everything lately: the Steam Deck got an insane price hike, and Samsung could be increasing the prices of its flagships as well. Budget handhelds are also feeling the heat, but has ANBERNIC quietly downgraded the RG34XXSP again?

According to a Reddit post by user Pixogen, their ANBERNIC RG34XXSP handheld didn’t come with 1GB of RAM as the company claims on its website. They did a teardown of the device, only to find that it had 512MB of memory.

That’s surprising because the handheld originally launched with 2GB of RAM last year. It was then quietly downgraded to 1GB of RAM, with the company citing component shortages in the market. Another downgrade within a few months makes things seem almost catastrophic.

Fortunately, the situation isn’t as bad as we initially thought. We reached out to ANBERNIC about this anomaly, and the company provided Android Authority with the following statement:

The standard capacity is 1GB. If they receive a 512MB model, please contact our after-sale customer service.

This should be an accident (I have already reported it to our production department).

While that’s great news for fans of the handheld, it also raises some questions. Installing a 512MB RAM chip instead of 1GB is a very peculiar accident, to say the least.

When the GBA SP-like handheld was downgraded to 1GB of RAM, the company had said that it wouldn’t affect usability. To be fair, it shouldn’t cause problems when playing old Game Boy Advance games. However, users have been reporting issues when installing MuOS and KNULLI to run ported games, and the problems seem to stem from the reduced amount of RAM.