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I love handheld gaming
but there are so many options to choose from
all with their own pros and cons.
Switch OLED, love the display,
hate the pricey walled garden of games.
Steam Deck, outstanding performance,
and the price, muah!
But you better have an LTT backpack to carry it around in.
LTTstore.com.
But what's this? The same AMD Ryzen 5,000 chip
from the Aya Neo Next with a 1080p OLED screen
and it's small enough to fit in my admittedly large pockets.
I was absolutely ecstatic when I first saw the Aya Neo Air.
It reads like a portable gaming enthusiasts wishlist.
Hall effect joysticks, dual USB type C ports
up to two terabytes of internal storage
with my micro SD expansion.
And they claim it doesn't even get that loud.
The whole package sounds too good to be true.
Aya Neo has been crushing pretty much everything
but their naming scheme over the last year
with products like the Next, the Pro and the Next Pro.
But when Valve swaggered into the handheld gaming PC scene
and slapped their giant deck on the table,
(indistinct whisper)
everything else suddenly looked downright overpriced
by comparison.
But this little guy right here, only 630 U.S. dollars
and inside you'll find 16 gigs of DDR4 Ram
at 4266 mega transfers per second, a 512 gig NVMe SSD
and a Ryzen 5 5560u processor with VEGA 6 graphics.
It even gets down to 499,
If you opt for the 128 gig drive and less memory.
But what's really surprising,
is the price of the full fat Pro version.
Two terabytes of storage.
32 gigs of Ram and a Ryzen 7 5825u.
Go ahead I'll give you a second to guess the price.
Ready?
Only $1,400. Okay. Yes, that's a lot of money
but it's a hundred dollars cheaper
than it's bulkier sibling, the Aya Neo Next,
while being significantly better in a number of key ways.
There are so many upgrades.
It's hard to know where to start,
but the most visually obvious one is the screen.
They've gone AMOLED and unlike the Steam Deck
which manages roughly 60% coverage of the SRGB color space
the Aya Neo Air can do 99% of DCIP three, which is more
than 100% of SRGB.
It's also shockingly color accurate
with an average Delta-E of just six, to be clear
that's not on par with a calibrated professional display
but for consumer hardware, it's very impressive.
For context we previously measured the Steam Deck
at around an average Delta-E of 15, and the best part
every pixel is self illuminating which means perfect blacks
and it hits a whopping max brightness of 360 nits.
That's similar to the Switch OLED.
Now, I still prefer the Steam Deck late at night
thanks to the outstanding work that Valve has done
on its dimming capabilities,
but under regular lighting conditions,
it looks downright basic in comparison,
which raises a question for me.
Why aren't there more OLEDs in the handheld space?
Well, according to Aya Neo,
they'd love to, but the problem is
that nobody's making them in the right size and resolution
and getting a new screen mold can cost millions of dollars.
Luckily for them and for us, they were able to
source this existing five and a half inch, 1080p design.
And it looks great. The only downside
to it seems to be the huge bezels around the edge.
And I would love to see the next version
expand the screen to utilize that empty space.
In terms of physical form factor, there are two versions,
the Air and the Air Pro both look identical from the front
and feel very light in my small boy hands.
But if we turn them this way,
you can see that the non-Pro is thinner.
Just 18 millimeters at its thinnest point.
And it's also about 50 grams lighter.
Both of them make the Steam Deck and the previous
Aya Neo Next look comically large.
And in my opinion, the Aya Neo Air
marks the point where this category goes
from small PCs that you can hold
to a handheld console that runs windows or Linux as it were.
And impressively, they've done this
without giving up any IO.
Both of the USBC ports can be used for charging
and connecting peripherals, including through a dock.
And we also get a headset deck,
a fingerprint sensor on the power button,
and this convenient micro SD card slot for extra storage.
Now you can upgrade the included internal M2.SSD
and unlike the steam deck,
it uses a more standard 2280 form factor, but it's a bit
of a pain to get to compared to Aya Neo's previous consoles.
You've probably already noticed by the way
the RGB around the thumbs sticks
which can indicate whether it's charging or low on battery.
I think that's super cool.
And the quality of the shell plastics
feels really good overall.
It's got a nice fingerprint resistant texture,
It's quite sturdy.
And while there are some minor tooling mismatches
like on the bottom three and a half millimeter jack,
I only noticed this because we've gone
through the process of creating our own molds
for our screwdriver recently, which by the way
will probably be available for order on lttstore.com
by the time we release this video.
I am so excited for you to get your hands on one.
One bit of feedback on the shell
is that while the triggers feel nice
and they also use high durability hall effect sensors
just like the joysticks.
Even with my small hands,
I had trouble reaching them comfortably in certain games.
For example, in Roller Drome, you often need to alternate
between moving the camera and pressing face buttons
while shooting. This results in a sort of
pincer like grip that can get a little tiring over time.
The top bumpers and these two programmable inner buttons
on the edge can also be a little awkward to reach
and only exacerbate that pincer problem.
Thankfully though,
you shouldn't need to press those ones very frequently.
With all that said, you're gonna hear very similar feedback
about pretty much any other handheld console.
They're small which means ergonomic compromises.
And, for most retro titles that don't utilize thumbs sticks
or triggers, especially at the same time.
It feels great. Side scrollers like Hollow Knight
or Dead Cells run amazing at 1080p and RPGs
like Octopath Traveler look stunning on the OLED display.
Since it's a windows device getting emulators
up and running is pretty easy, but I would recommend hooking
up a keyboard and a mouse through the USB-C hub.
At least while you get everything configured.
It's a real time saver
and you will probably spend some time configuring emulators
because I think that's what a lot
of people are going to use this for.
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- Or, maybe you'll stick to Double-A or Indie games.
The reality is, while the Ryzen 5560U
and 5825U are both solid CPU's.
Their VAGA graphics is holding them back
in a big way compared to the Steam Deck
and to the GPD Win Max Two.
Both of which are powered by RDNA 2 GPUs.
To be clear, depending on your expectations
you may be perfectly happy running, even modern
Triple-A games, but if you're expecting anything better
than 30 FPS, 720p low settings,
you're setting yourself up for disappointment.
Even the maximum 18 watt pro mode, wasn't enough
to put our Air Pro, which has the top spec chip
in the same performance class as the Steam Deck.
I mean, it's still respectable.
We managed to punch above 30 FPS
in some Tripe-A games at 720p, low.
And while we didn't benchmark every Indie game
they were all clearly running at well over 60 FPS
full 1080p. Hollow Knight, Dead Cells and Roller Drum
didn't so much as hiccup during prolonged gameplay,
even when turns down to 8 or 12 Watts,
but there's actually some more bad news.
If you're all about performance per dollar
the Steam Deck is still going to look more compelling.
It comes out ahead at basically every power setting
which affects more than just FPS charts.
Consider battery life.
We set both of these devices down to five Watts
and left control running at 720p at the start of the game.
Not only did our Aya Neo Air Pro shut down first,
but it could barely even display the game
at this wattage hovering around the 10 FPS mark.
Our Steam Deck with the same settings,
lasted about 30 minutes longer
and the game was also in a much more playable state.
That means that
if you're willing to accept the Air's performance level
you'd actually get more time away from the wall
with Valve's handheld.
However, if you want a 1080p OLED Indie
crushing machine that is lighter and way more compact,
it's kind of a no brainer and I'm gonna pick the Aya Neo Air
or the Air Pro every single time.
I don't need a 400 PPI display with incredible contrast
and decent color accuracy, but I want it.
And it really does put the Steam Deck's display to shame.
Maybe Valve can cook up their own OLED version of the Deck.
But hopefully by that time, we'll see an Aya Neo model
with AMD's 6,000 series processors
like we saw in the GPD Win Max Two.
I would absolutely love that in this form factor,
but, and this is especially true
if you're buying this generation be warned
there are some quirks.
Sometimes our cursor didn't display on the desktop
or the task bar when using a mouse
and changing the resolution with Aya Space led
to some pretty awful results that might take a little bit
of wrestling to get it back into a usable state.
Some games and emulators did have minor issues
that could have been caused
by the portrait rotated to landscape display.
Though, it should be noted
that most handheld will run into the same issues.
And I think it's fair to say that Aya Space
will really need to improve over the next year or so.
To be clear, they're making great progress but
I ran into several UX issues while
simply trying to launch games or change settings.
Particularly when using the physical buttons to
navigate rather than the touchscreen.
Also, remember how I mentioned that changing the SSD
on this bad boy, isn't as much of a cakewalk as the next.
Well, it's beautiful.
And there are almost no visible screws
but as you can see from our tear down footage,
that means there's a much higher chance
of cosmetic damage when you open it up
and you'll need to do a bit more
than just open the shelves to make the upgrade.
Wanna upgrade your LTT experience
by the way, that's super easy.
Just subscribe to floatplane.com for
behind the scenes and exclusive content.
This thing is truly impressive
but it also raises a couple of questions.
Like how is it so cheap? And what could possibly be next?
The answer to the first one as it turns
out is that there's just not a lot
of profit margin this time around.
No really, with this evolution of the product line
it was apparently more, a matter of
solving the existing Aya Neo problems
of being too heavy and too thick, rather
than trying to turn this into a hugely profitable product.
As for what's next, our RDNA 2
Graphics is on the horizon, and with it, the Aya Neo Two
which should hopefully incorporate some
of the design we've seen here today, which is a kind
of inconvenient fact that makes it hard for me to truly fall
in love with the Aya Neo Air 'cause the thing is,
after trying out the 6800U and the Win Max Two,
I just can't stop thinking about that chip
in this machine with this delicious OLED display.
We're gonna have all the handhelds that we talked
about today, linked in the video description by the way.
So you can get one for yourself if you want.
But if it was my money, I'd be waiting for next gen.
Are you guys stoked about the handheld PC gaming boom
that's going on right now?
Leave a comment below.
And if you liked this video,
make sure to check out our video on the Win Max Two.
It is definitely the way to go if you game somewhat
but you also want the versatility to use your gaming machine
as a full-fledged laptop, computer.