AYANEO NEXT vs Valve Steam Deck – New handheld PC announced

Is AYANEO's latest device a worthy Steam Deck competitor?

Sayem Ahmed

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It’s been a pretty wild year for AYANEO, which was acquired after the success of their original Indiegogo campaign wherein they launched a portable handheld gaming device that packed a huge amount of power under the hood. After the acquisition, they struggled to fulfill their previous Indiegogo orders. However, now with the acquisition fully complete, they have come back fighting with their newly announced line of AYANEO NEXT products, which promise more power than even the Valve Steam Deck, which these devices will inevitably be compared to, as they revealed on their official website.

The AYANEO NEXT line comes in three different SKUs at launch. Designed by the founder, Arthur Zhang, each unit will have his unique signature at the back of each unit. The device itself is packed full of all of the features that you would come to expect, including a 7-inch, capacitive touchscreen display, up to 32 GB of LPDDR4X, and packing a Ryzen 5800U with AMD Radeon Vega 8 graphics. While it is disappointing to not see the Ryzen 6000 series of Rembrandt CPUs in this lineup equipped with RDNA2 graphics, surely AYANEO is preparing a successor with all the newest-generation bells and whistles.

Including features such as fingerprint unlock, motion sensors, and more. The AYANEO NEXT looks to be an incredibly competitive handheld that is at least on paper, more powerful than the silicon in Valve’s highly anticipated Steam Deck device. The performance that you can expect out of the AYANEO NEXT includes around 30fps in Cyberpunk 2077, but this anecdotal test data has to be corroborated with real-world results, which we’ll not be able to see until people start getting units in their hands.

With modular buttons and supposedly ‘no drift’ thanks to hall sensors on joysticks and triggers which supposedly also make them more accurate, which is more of a solution than either Sony or Nintendo have come up with. Equally, the design of this device looks to be leagues ahead of the original AYANEO design and features curves and colors in all of the right places to make for what looks to be an excellent handheld experience. Curiously, AYANEO calls the texture of the plastic ‘BabySkin’, not too sure what that’s on about. Additionally, the device will also be shipping with several different colorways, all of which look stunning across the three different SKUs, which have fairly minimal differences.

These three SKUs are named AYANEO NEXT, NEXT ADVANCE, and NEXT PRO. The latter two models offer 32GB of ram in addition to a larger 2TB NVMe drive, but the rest of the specs are the same, so you can expect similar performance out of all of these models, regardless of what you choose.

AYANEO NEXT v Steam Deck Specifications

Overall, it looks like the AYANEO NEXT and the Steam Deck often go toe to toe with their good and bad points, unfortunately without both of the devices on hand to test against each other, we cannot draw a clear conclusion as to what device is going to be better. However, based on the value proposition alone, the Valve Steam Deck uses the economies of scale that Valve has access to as a large company in order to offset the costs of the device and allow it to become accessible to a wider audience, the AYANEO NEXT lacks this advantage and should be taken into consideration for anyone looking to purchase one of these devices. However, the base model of the Steam Deck also lacks a dedicated m.2, opting for a paltry 64GB MMC-based storage option which simply is not acceptable in 2022.

Aesthetically, the AYANEO NEXT beats out the Steam Deck by miles, and it looks like a lovely little powerful portable rather than Valve’s uninviting slab of silicon and circuitry. If you’re after a Steam Deck, you can find out where to get one here, but it has been subject to numerous delays.

AYA NEO NEXT release date and price

The AYA NEO NEXT will be launching in February 2022 and starting at a price of $1265 USD. Considering the competitiveness of the Steam Deck, it might be worth waiting until the Steam Deck and the AYA NEO NEXT are both commercially available to make your purchasing decision, as the Steam Deck just looks like the better buy right now.