Well my Kickstarter unit arrived yesterday, and I've had a little bit time to test it out, trying to focus on the device itself and not how long it took me to get it.
It runs games well, I'll give it that. But the buttons stick, and the dpad grinds against the sides, and has issues with certain directions. It's also all very squeaky. It's hard playing games that require pressing lots of buttons rapidly and changing direction quickly.
Apparently this gets better with use, but if "getting better" means grinding the paint down, leaving ugly white marks on the dpad until it works, then that's already happening. I still need to try grease it up when I get a chance, hopefully that will help. I can't even do a running crouch in Mario 3.
The color on the screen is more washed out that I was expecting. I knew I wasn't getting a high-end screen, but I thought it would have a bit richer color. The resolution doesn't really suit GBA games, but it fits SNES well enough and it probably was the best choice for the price.
The OS, app menus and most games are very basic, and not very attractive. You can tell most of the designing was done by developers. Also every game seems to have a different way of exiting, I've even had to do a hard reset because I couldn't find any way of exiting a game. As a Nintendo fan, I don't like Y being the top face button but I can get over that, however I get Start and Select mixed up too often. It's opposite to how I feel it should be.
This is a good device. Is it worth the $155 including postage I spent January 2013? No. But it makes a good basic handheld emulator if you can get it cheap, with some good homebrew games, and you might have some fun with it if you're a developer. I'm a disappointed customer though.