Turns out I'm not really getting on with the pocket 5!
I find I quite uncomfortable to hold when I want to use the triggers. And especially triggers plus analogue sticks. The analogue stick is in the wrong place on a fairly powerful 16.9 device, I'm having to squeeze the device quite hard with my left hand and my thumb is at an odd angle. The steam deck is much more comfortable for this even though I really like that the RP5 is a lot smaller. I think it would have been more comfortable with smaller digital L2R2 buttons. Although that affects streaming modern games.
The Dpad and face button games feel good but I'll use a 4:3 device for that. The buttons themselves all feel cheaper than my $60 RGXX35H.
The sound quality is awful, it has "no treble" or the higher frequencies in a equaliser/mixer buried somewhere have been turned down drastically. Both speakers sound the same.
The out of the box experience was a bit lacking with a few tutorials running at the same time (which makes the screen dim for everything outside of the tutorial box including the other tutorial boxes) and running retroid launcher didn't seem to work. So now I'm launching my games from normal android which is fine.