To see the effect having a screen with non-native resolution would bring to the visual output, I took some macro photos of games running on both Game Gear 3DS Virtual Console and the Game Gear Micro.
What should be the sharpest Game Gear image thanks to its small size becomes a small, blurry one instead:
GG Shinobi (highway)
Nazo Puyo 3 (battle)
Nazo Puyo 3 (overworld)
Suspend menu
There is one exception - the front-end is indeed native resolution and looks very nice and crisp. But that’s not where you’re going to be spending most of your time. But savour the crispness!
The worst affected games are those with simple sprites - it does Shining Force no favours.
As for early hardware impressions, @Yakumo covered it well in his video.
To reiterate from my end, from my short time with it it’s big on novelty but small on practicality, but that was always going to be the case from what we’ve seen so far.
Display quibbles aside, the other disappointment I have is the buttons and D-Pad just aren’t very good at all, which is a surprise considering they are similar in size to the Game Boy Micro’s. The buttons barely have 1mm of travel, and are extremely wobbly, while the D-Pad is extremely stiff - you can rock it about slightly but all the directions aren’t equal. Left is particularly tricky to pull off with ease on all four of my units. But again, I’ll wait until I play something demanding at length - like GG Shinobi - before declaring any final judgement about it.