Steam Deck may well be the most mainstream example of the handheld gaming PC, but Valve is certainly not the first company to give the concept a shot. Other manufacturers got there first and continue to innovate with intriguing products. The AyaNeo Air is the most exciting of those handhelds yet, in that it’s something of an anti-Deck. The Air is small and easy to handle in the way that Steam Deck is not. It has the OLED panel with the inky blacks and incredible contrast that the Deck’s mediocre IPS LCD does not. Also – for good or bad – it runs on Windows 11, meaning that it plays everything, something that remains beyond the Deck when running the default Steam OS.
First impressions are compelling, exactly because of its miniature form factor, like a kind of hybrid between Switch, Switch Lite and PlayStation Vita. But it’s at this point we should point out that there are actually two versions of the AyaNeo air – a standard model with a 28Wh battery and a thicker, heavier Pro model with a 38Wh variant. Battery life, as we shall discover, is a real problem on the standard machine.
What both have in common are the same basic aesthetics, the same excellent analogue sticks and face buttons, the same lovely display and the same SD card reader. I found the shoulder triggers a little ‘spongy’ for my tastes while the shoulder buttons feel a little insubstantial but there are some genuine nice ideas here, such as USB-Cs top and bottom, both capable of charging.
In terms of specs, the AyaNeo Air has a bewildering array of options, so let’s boil it down to the bare minimum. There’s an ‘entry level’ version with 8GB of DDR4X-3200 memory and a 128GB SSD, which I think you should discount straight away. AMD APUs, like the Ryzen 5 5560U common to all variants of the standard Air thrive on memory bandwidth, so I’d recommend the more expensive 16GB DDR4X-4200. The processor itself is effectively a cut-down version of the Ryzen 7 5825U, available at the upper echelons of the AyaNeo Air Pro spec list. The full chip has eight CPU cores and 16 threads, reduced to six cores and 12 threads on the Ryzen 5. Eight Vega GPU compute units on the top-end Ryzen 7 drop down to six on the Ryzen 5. The only other spec variant to be aware of between Air and Air Pro is the battery – get the Pro with the larger battery. It’s bulkier, but not to any degree that actively interferes with gaming.