So long, Lenovo’s Game Boy-like handheld; we barely knew you. The PC maker has quietly ended all options to buy its licensed Lenovo G02 handheld—a device that could come stocked with a mountain of illegally sourced games from Nintendo’s back catalogs—in or outside the U.S.
The news comes first from Retrododo, which had been tracking Lenovo’s Game Boy over the last few months. You can no longer find the device for sale on dropshipping sites like AliExpress or Alibaba. After an initial rush of inquiries about its Game Boy device, Lenovo reportedly pulled its name directly from listings, only for more devices to crop up on dropshipping sites bearing the new name “Sunyao G02.” Retrododo reported last month these new handheld listings positioned the Sunyao subsidiary, dubbed a “Lenovo ecological brand.” The handheld isn’t exactly dead. Simply, Lenovo is no longer allowing its name to be associated with any of these devices. You can find what seems to be the same handheld under a separate brand, Gusgu, with devices still listed on AliExpress. This “Gusgu H7” sells for around $60 with a microSD card included. That hints that these handhelds still come loaded with ill-gotten games. © AliExpress; screenshot by Gizmodo Lenovo is the world’s largest laptop manufacturer by market cap. With that standing in the PC market, the company normally sets a certain standard of quality across its devices made for the U.S. market, but the G02 was nothing more than a licensing deal for a cheap Game Boy knockoff. Lenovo previously told Gizmodo that such licensed products “may differ from Lenovo products sold through Lenovo’s authorized global channels.” Lenovo added that it doesn’t authorize these licensed, region-exclusive products to sell outside of China and that it doesn’t support trade in pirated games.
