At a time when most handheld game consoles look like souped up versions of classic Nintendo or Sony PlayStation designs, Chinese handheld designer Sugar Cubes is taking inspiration from a different source for its latest mobile gaming device.
The Sugar Cubes N97 Elite is a handheld with a 4.6 inch display and a compact body that measure just 119 x 56mm (4.7″ x 2.2″). But you can slide the screen upward to reveal a set of game controllers. When you do that the screen also tilts at a slight angle. And if that wasn’t enough to give you an idea of the classic gadget that inspired this design, it’s right there in the name: this is basically a Nokia N97 smartphone reimagined with as a modern gaming device.
Nokia’s N97 smartphone hit the streets in 2009 and featured a 3.5 inch display and QWERTY keyboard. Sugar Cubes squeezed a larger screen into a similar-sized body by shrinking the bezels and replaced the keyboard with game controllers.
The N97 Elite also has a lot more horsepower under the hood – it supports up to a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855+ processor, 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. While that chip is showing its age (it was released in 2019), it should be powerful enough to support emulators for classic game consoles up to the Nintendo GameCube and Sony PlayStation 2 generation.
That said, the buttons look rather tiny. There’s a D-Pad, but no analog sticks. And it’s unclear if this thing is going to be sold outside of China anytime soon. It sells for 1499 CNY (about $200) and up in that country.
But it does appear to be a real device that’s already shipping to customers in China. After showing off prototypes on Chinese social media late last year, Sugar Cubes has started shipping the N97 Elite to customers, and hands-on pictures and videos are starting to pop up at Bilibili and other sites (even relying on Google Translate, it’s easy to tell that not all of the reviews are positive).
via /r/SBCGaming and NITTRX (YouTube)
