Analogue Pocket’s first big update is finally coming in July as a beta

Analogue Pocket’s long-awaited 1.1 update will finally be arriving in July, Analogue announced in a short blog post on Friday.

The Analogue Pocket OS v1.1 release will include beta versions of the Library, Memories, and FPGA development features, according to the blog post. You can read more about the first two features in our article from October; the Library will be a huge historical archive about retro games, while Memories will let you capture and load save states as well as capture screenshots.

It seems like the development feature will allow developers to take advantage of the Analogue’s second FPGA (field-programmable gate array). “Pocket is designed to be as easy as possible to develop and port FPGA cores to,” Analogue says on its website. “We added a second dedicated FPGA just for developers to develop and port their own cores. Developers will be able to interface with Analogue OS: Library, Memories, and Tools. And to Pocket hardware, I/O’s and scalers.”

At the time of the retro handheld’s December launch, Analogue told Polygon that the update would be arriving in January, but now, the company is saying a beta of the update is set to arrive six months later. It’s not clear what the holdup has been or when Analogue expects to bring 1.1 to be out of beta. Analogue CEO and founder Christopher Taber didn’t immediately reply to requests for clarification.

Even without the features arriving with v1.1, the Analogue Pocket is still an impressive device, with my colleague Andrew Webster saying that “the Pocket breathes new life into old games by showing them at their very best” in his review. But if you don’t already have one of the handhelds, you might be waiting a while to get it. The next set of preorders (Group B) is scheduled to arrive in Q4, and if you preorder a Pocket right now, you won’t get it until sometime in 2023.