To be honest, I can’t say I didn’t see this coming. The boom in the handheld gaming department has sparked a lot of excitement with the Steamdeck and then the, most recently announced, ASUS ROG Ally, but now there is a new player ready to enter the arena.
The Ayaneo Air 1S is a Windows OS powered handheld gaming device that’s looking to challenge the big names like Steam and ASUS.
Their hook is that they have created the thinnest and most lightweight handheld device, while still maintaining great performance. It should come without thinking that a thin and lightweight are two features that weigh heavily on your decision when picking something portable.
The Air 1S will come in two flavours, the standard edition will weigh in at 450g, just 30g lighter than the Switch, and is 21.6mm thin. It features a 5.5-inch 1920×1080 AMOLED screen, and a 10,050mAh battery, and will have three storage setups; a 16GB RAM option will come with 512GB of storage while a 32GB RAM option will allow you to choose between one, two or four terabytes of storage. The limited edition weighs in at 405g and is 18mm thin, it will have the same screen as the standard edition but will have a smaller 7,350mAh battery. While the battery is smaller the Limited Edition model has a lower power usage so usage times should be similar between the two models.
Both models feature an AMD Ryzen 7 7840U Processor, LPDDR5X RAM, M2 SSDs, hall sensing joysticks, linear hall triggers, 6 Axis gyroscope, 4D vibration, 2x USB Type-C ports, a 3.5mm audio jack a TF Card slot, WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 and a fingerprint sensing power button.
On paper, these little bad boys should compare, at least in performance, to the ROG Ally, but without having any out in the wild just yet our guesses will be as good as yours. Ayaneo doesn’t distribute to any local retailers so your only way of picking one up right now is off of Indiegogo.
At around R14,500 for the 16GB option, it’s not badly priced compared to the other handheld devices in the market, and if you pump the specs all the way up to the 4TB, 32GB model you’re looking closer at the R19,000 price mark.
I love the colour options that come with the Ayaneo Air 1S as well, that Retro Power colourway has got me swooning so hard I’m about to tell NAG we need one ‘for the office’.
You can find out more about the device over on their website.
What do you think about other brands entering the handheld market? Let me know in the comments below.