The Analogue Pocket will soon come in eight Game Boy Pocket/Advance colors

They made a range of translucent models that sold out in less than a minute and (surprise, surprise) seemingly all found their way on to eBay for three times the original price.

An $80 kit that has an FPGA and swappable cores, super-high resolution screen, to build a machine in a similarly portable form factor? Where exactly have you seen that?

You're commenting on an FPGA handheld with OLED, not an AliExpress android clone. Where are you seeing kits for less?

A kit? what do you mean? I would love one of these

It wasn't for a long time, but apparently they were able to crack it for emulation. That said, the whole appeal of the Analogue was for the genuine, native playback of physical cartridges. Emulation doesn't seem to have basic features you'd expect from an emulation device like save states or fast-forward. If I were you, I'd go for something like the RG35xx or the Miyoo Mini +

If you don't have cartridges, at the moment it may be hard to justify the price. The reason is the screen - it is so high resolution, it will emulate sub-pixel LCD screen characteristics from the original GB/GBC/GG screens, BUT ONLY for physical cartridges OR GB/GBC games that have been converted to .pocket files (you can do this easily, but it's still an extra step).

So for most people, it will play similar to the much cheaper Miyoo Mini or other Chinese emulation handhelds.

However, there has been a long-held expectation that Analogue will enable display mode options in the OpenFPGA cores, which would erase this handicap and mean absolutely, if you want to get the real experience of these systems, this is the only game in town. But it hasn't happened yet. You may not be able to buy a system later though, when it happens, so it's kind of a gamble.

From what I see it's extremely limited experience compared to other devices