Rabbit R1 gets modded to run games, performs better than expected

Earlier this month, a YouTuber named HowToMen showcased the Rabbit R1 running Android. With this mod, the device that was originally meant to be less distracting than a phone got to function like one. That isn't a bad thing, though, as Rabbit didn't quite meet the expectations that it had set before launching the R1.

Nonetheless, with Android installed, the R1 can do pretty much everything that you can do on an Android phone. That includes running apps, browsing the web, and watching videos. Also, as shown by another YouTuber named Bringus Studios, it can run games too.

Of course, the modded Rabbit R1 isn't the most convenient way to play games on a mobile device. For starters, it comes with a small display, measuring 2.88-inch. The screen isn't the most pixel-dense either. Then, there's the low-powered hardware. The device is powered by a Helio G36 SoC, an entry-level processor from late last year.

This SoC is paired with  4 GB of RAM, but surprisingly, Device Info HW shows that the Rabbit R1 sports over 100 GB of storage. That's more than enough to hold a large game library. Speaking of which, Bringus Studios ran a couple of games on the modded device.

While the device has low-performance hardware, it handled the games reasonably well. Bringus Studios showed Minecraft running smoothly on the modded Rabbit R1. It even ran emulated games, such as Vice City Stories running with PPSSPP, at playable frame rates.

But again, given that there is only one button and the screen is very small, you need to connect a controller to play games on the R1 (Razer Kishi curr. $49.99 on Amazon). Bringus Studios did push the hardware to its limit by running Half-Life 2, and it took about 10 minutes to load the map for the first time. You can see the modded device in action by watching the video attached below.