RG406H vs RG556: identical grades, $7 apart, two screens

Two Anbernic handhelds, eight months apart, and the same grade sheet.

The RG556 shipped in March 2024; the RG406H followed in November of the same year. Both carry the Unisoc T820 with 8 GB of LPDDR4X and 128 GB of UFS 2.2 storage, both boot Android 13, and on the seventeen systems our capability index records for each of them they hold the identical letter in every single cell. Fifteen of those seventeen clear the B line this site treats as the playable threshold: everything through Dreamcast, including the Nintendo DS, the Nintendo 64 and the PSP. Above that both sit in the same shallow bands, GameCube at B+, Wii at B, Nintendo 3DS at B+ and PlayStation 2 at B, and both fail everything from the Wii U upward.

So there is no capability question here, which is what makes the pair worth a page. What separates them is the glass, the weight, and seven dollars.

The sheet, cell by cell

Seventeen cells, seventeen ties. There is no system where one of these devices is better than the other by so much as half a band, and if the question you brought was which of them plays more, the answer is neither.

That identity is not a quirk of this particular pair. Six machines in our catalogue carry this exact row, and every one of them is Anbernic: the RG406V, the RG476H, the RG406H, the RG Cube, the RG556 and the RG Slide. The row is the fingerprint of one chip family in six shells, and inside it the letters separate nothing at all. We have walked the same sheet on sibling pairs before, most recently the Mangmi Air X against the RG406H and the RG556 against the RG557, and the lesson repeats.

Seven dollars, and two very different shops

The catalogue tracks $168 for the RG406H and $175 for the RG556. Both are maker prices in US dollars, meaning what the maker asks rather than what a European ends up paying once import VAT, duty and the battery and chemical fees that ride with any console shipped from outside the EU have landed. Neither device has a verified EU listing on this site today, so there is no shop we can point you to that sells either one with VAT already inside the number shown. Two devices in the same plastic, a seven dollar gap, and no European shelf price for either.

The two are not, however, equally available, and in practice that matters more than the seven dollars. Anbernic still sells the RG556 directly. It does not list the RG406H at all: search Anbernic's own shop for 406H and what comes back is the vertical RG406V, the RG476H and a carry case moulded for a device the shop no longer carries. The RG406H's catalogue figure is therefore a tracked price, not a shelf price, and what you actually pay depends on whichever marketplace still holds stock and what it is asking this week. That does not make the device worse. It makes the purchase a different act, closer to buying used gear than to buying a current product, and a comparison against a machine the maker still advertises has to say so out loud.

Four by three against sixteen by nine

Here is the whole of the difference, on two lines.

The RG406H has a 4.0 inch IPS touchscreen at 960 x 720. That is a 4:3 panel at 300 pixels per inch.

The RG556 has a 5.48 inch AMOLED touchscreen at 1920 x 1080. That is a 16:9 panel at roughly 400 pixels per inch.

Both are OCA laminated, both refresh at 60 Hz, both are glass across the whole face. The RG556's panel is not merely bigger, it is a third denser, and it is OLED, which is the one hardware line on this page that no table can convey: black pixels that switch off rather than glow.

The aspect ratio is the decision, and it is a decision you make about your own library rather than about the hardware. A 4:3 image on a 16:9 panel fills all of the height and three quarters of the width: on the RG556 that is 1440 x 1080 of lit glass, with a quarter of the screen spent on black columns. A 16:9 image on a 4:3 panel does the mirror trick: 960 x 540 inside the RG406H's 960 x 720, the same quarter lost, this time as bars above and below. Whichever you buy, one family of systems renders boxed, and which family that is depends on what you play.

• SNES, Nintendo 64, PlayStation 1, Dreamcast and the DS are all 4:3 or close to it. On the RG406H they fill the screen; on the RG556 they run pillarboxed.
• PSP is 16:9. It fills the RG556 at essentially the full 1080 lines; on the RG406H it becomes a 960 x 540 letterbox inside a smaller panel.
• The DS is the one system where the arithmetic turns decisive. Two 256 x 192 screens side by side are 512 x 192, an 8:3 pair. Fitted to the RG556 they land at 960 x 720 each, which is to say each DS screen gets the entire panel of the RG406H to itself. Fitted to the RG406H the pair arrives at 480 x 360 each, half the height of its own screen. If dual-screen games are a large part of why you are shopping, this is the number that decides it, and it is arithmetic from the two resolutions rather than a claim about either machine.

Density is the quieter half of the same argument. At 300 pixels per inch the RG406H is a sharp panel by the standards of Android handhelds; at 400 the RG556 is sharper still, and the gap shows up in exactly the places that annoy people, which are eight pixel menu fonts and HUD corners in a 4:3 RPG. Neither figure is a marketing number; both fall out of the diagonal and the resolution on each maker's sheet.

Sixty-six grams

The RG406H measures 174 x 81 x 17.9 mm and weighs 265 grams. The RG556 measures 223 x 90 mm and 15 to 25 mm deep, and weighs 331 grams.

Read those numbers as a buying instruction rather than a spec line. The RG406H is 49 mm narrower and 66 grams lighter, which is a quarter of the RG556's own weight given away, and it is the only one of the two that goes into a coat pocket without a discussion. The RG556 is 223 mm across, longer than most inside pockets are deep, and it is a bag device: it will travel with you, but it will travel inside something.

That is the trade the panels imply. A 5.48 inch screen needs a body wide enough to hold it, and the RG556 pays for its glass in exactly the currency the RG406H is trying to save. Nothing here is a defect on either side; it is two makers answering the same question, one with a pocket and one with a cinema.

Both devices carry the same control set on the sheet: Hall effect thumbsticks with L3 and R3 click, Hall triggers, a six-axis gyroscope, a fan with a heat pipe, dual stereo speakers firing from the bottom edge, a 3.5 mm headphone jack, USB-C video out and WiFi 5 with Bluetooth 5.0. Neither maker publishes rumble on either sheet, and we will not invent a difference where both are silent.

Five hundred milliamp hours, and one honest silence

The RG406H carries a 5000 mAh cell. The RG556 carries 5500, which is ten percent more, and Anbernic's own product page claims eight hours of runtime from it and about three and a half hours to charge at 5V/2A.

There is no equivalent runtime claim we can still cite for the RG406H, because the maker no longer serves a product page for it. That absence is worth saying plainly instead of papering over: the 500 mAh deficit is real and points one way, the panel difference points the other way, and we have not measured either runtime ourselves. Treat the battery as a small edge to the RG556 rather than a figure you can plan a flight around.

Both machines run hot enough under load to have shipped with active cooling, and both makers list a heat pipe and a fan rather than a vent and a hope.

Six shells, one row, and the least expensive way in

If the grade table is genuinely all you care about, neither device in this comparison is the value answer, and saying so plainly is the point of this section. These are the six machines that share the row, at the prices they carry today:

• RG Cube, $122.99 at Anbernic, marked down from $169.99. A 3.95 inch square panel at 720 x 720, which fits 4:3 software into 720 x 540 and widescreen software into 720 x 405.
• RG406V, $160.27 at Anbernic, marked down from $164.99. The vertical version of the RG406H, same 4 inch class of screen, catalogue figure $155.
• RG476H, $159.99 at Anbernic, marked down from $169.99. Horizontal, larger shell, catalogue figure $165.
• RG406H, $168 catalogue figure. The horizontal subject of this page, no longer listed by the maker.
• RG556, $175 catalogue figure. The other subject, still sold by Anbernic.
• RG Slide, $190 catalogue figure. The sliding one, and the most expensive of the six.

Six devices, one identical row of seventeen letters, and a spread of more than sixty dollars between the least and the most expensive of them. The least expensive route into this exact grade sheet is the RG Cube at $122.99, which is $52 below the RG556's catalogue figure and $45 below the RG406H's, and it gets there with a square panel that boxes every 16:9 system hard and leaves a quarter of itself dark on the 4:3 ones.

That is the honest shape of this price bracket. The letters were earned once by Anbernic and then reused in six shells; what you pay for above the RG Cube is the glass and the body, not a higher frame rate. So the question this page actually answers is not which of the two is faster, because neither is. It is which panel you want to look at for the next four years, and how much plastic you are willing to carry to get it.

Verdict: buy the panel, if you are buying either

The RG556 is the better buy for most people. For seven dollars more than the RG406H's catalogue figure you get a 5.48 inch 1080p AMOLED at roughly 400 pixels per inch, a third more pixel density, a 500 mAh larger cell, a maker that still sells and supports the device, and enough width that dual-screen games render at the full size of the smaller machine's entire display. The price of all that is 66 grams and 49 mm of pocket.

Buy the RG406H instead only if pocketability is the actual reason you are shopping, or if the 4:3 consoles are nearly all of what you play and you have found one at a price that reflects a device its maker has stopped advertising. It is a good machine with a good panel, and on capability it gives away nothing at all. It is simply the one of the two that you can no longer buy from the people who made it.

Buy neither if you were hoping for Wii U, Switch or PlayStation 3. Both sheets grade F on all three and no firmware will move those letters. In this bracket the ceiling is PlayStation 2 at B, and if that is not enough, the honest answer is a different price class rather than a different plastic shell.

Sources

• Anbernic - ANBERNIC RG556 product page, for the 5.48 inch 1080 x 1920 AMOLED panel, the T820 at 6 nm, the 8 GB of LPDDR4X, the 128 GB of UFS 2.2, the 5500 mAh cell with its eight hour claim, the 5V/2A charging, the Hall sticks and triggers, the fan and heat pipe and the 190 customer reviews, read 5 November 2026: anbernic.com/products/rg556
• Anbernic - store search for 406H, for the RG406V at $160.27 against $164.99, the RG476H at $159.99 against $169.99, and the absence of any RG406H product listing, read 5 November 2026: anbernic.com/search?q=406H
• Anbernic - ANBERNIC RG Cube product page, for the 3.95 inch 720 x 720 panel, the same T820 platform, the 5200 mAh cell with its seven hour claim and the $122.99 sale price against $169.99, read 5 November 2026: anbernic.com/products/rg-cube
• Lost In Consoles - the seventeen-system capability index, its A to F grade definitions and the B-or-better playable threshold used throughout this page: lostinconsoles.com/compatibility
• Lost In Consoles - RG406H specification sheet, for the dimensions, the weight, the 4.0 inch 960 x 720 panel, the 5000 mAh cell and the tracked price quoted above: lostinconsoles.com/consoles/rg-406h-anbernic
• Lost In Consoles - RG556 specification sheet, for the dimensions, the weight, the 5.48 inch 1920 x 1080 AMOLED panel, the 5500 mAh cell and the tracked price quoted above: lostinconsoles.com/consoles/rg-556-anbernic