“This product is EXTREMELY good. It is very rare that you find something like this which comes (1) fully assembled (I can't solder worth anything), (2) with easy to use, well documented and well supported software (SDK + various tools), (3) from a company that stands behind their products like Pimoroni (and not some random crowd funding project that will disappear in 2 months).
Re: the system itself, the build quality seems very good to me. The screen is on the small side (I wouldn't mind it being a bit larger) and it needs a screen protector (but it's hard to find any of the appropriate size, unfortunately) but it's bright, has decent color reproduction and it's very easy to read at multiple angles. The buttons and d-pad all feel good, the piezo buzzer does what it says on the tin. The case is heavy and robust, I would say almost if not fully kid-proof. Though I have to say I'd have appreciated a technical drawing of the case being available online to simplify the creation of custom face and backplates.
To me the best thing of all is the SDK that Pimoroni put together. It layers on top of the Pi Pico SDK, which is very robust and well documented. The Picosystem SDK is simple to use. This is extremely important for this kind of platform -- you want people to get started very quickly without having to spend several days figuring out quirks of the platform. The SDK achieves that goal -- all the code you write is to draw, drive the speaker, read the button and implement the game logic. No crud, no glue code, nothing of the sort is required. At the same time, for advanced users all the raw Pi Pico capabilities are there waiting to be used and easy to access.
All in all to me this is a 5-star product, fully worth the price.”
“Sturdy and responsive little handheld system, with a fun and we'll developed platform game preloaded. Even though I anticipated it to be small, this thing is genuinely tiny, which does make use awkward for anything more than ten minutes or so. I purchased to use as a platform to learn python, though there is very little guidance on how to so this or get started. I had to pull together guides from 32blit and Adafruit to get underway. There are few examples, and those I did find were incomplete, didn't specifically target the PicoSystem or did not function well. This will probably improve as the community grows but I would not recommend for a beginner looking to start developing handheld games.”
“System works well, instructions are good. I had issues with tool chain on windows for raspberry pico sdk. Once I switched to Debian in virtual box everything worked fine. I recommend using putty and ssh for programming to get copy paste functionality and winscp to copy files. The hardware is very well built and I highly recommend it.”
