Has the Steam Deck caught your eye, but you’re upset that an Australian release is nowhere in sight? Well one company is looking to fill that void. A company called Aye Neo is releasing its Aya Neo Next in Australian stores such as Amazon, Big W, Harvey Norman, JB Hi-Fi, EB Games and The Gamesmen in August.
The console runs Windows 10 and it’s biggest selling point is the fact that it can run games from not only Steam, but also the likes of Xbox Game Pass and the Epic Games Store as well.
It has a powerful AMD Ryzen 7 5825U CPU, an AMD Radeon Vega 8, 16GB of ram and a 1TB SSD, which a very good amount of super fast storage. As far as displays go it has a 7″ touchscreen 1280×800 IPS display.
When playing games on the Aya Neo Next, the company says that you can expect to get between 30-60FPS when playing games such as Cyberpunk 2077, God of War, Forza Horizon 5, The Witcher 3, Grand Theft Auto V and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, depending on what graphics settings you’re playing on.
The hard pill to swallow at the moment would have to be the price, which is set at $1,999 AUD when it launches in August 2022. You can currently pre-order it at the below links.
For comparison sake, the highest tier Steam Deck with a 512GB SSD costs $649 USD (although they’re sold out until next year overseas), which will likely be well over $1,000 AUD whenever it launches here (you’re looking at roughly $2,000) if you want to buy one now), so it’s really weighing up how much you want a portable PC in the short term, as well as the likes of being able to play Xbox Games Pass games and such easily.
With no Aussie Steam Deck release in sight, I’m super excited to be testing the AYANEO Next which is coming to Australian retailers in the next couple of months. It’s a Windows 11 handheld gaming device that can run all PC games from any launcher! @AYANEO__ pic.twitter.com/7k1o8M4jIt
— Shannon Grixti (@shancake_) June 24, 2022
In terms of our thoughts, we just got our hands on the Aya Neo Next and will be bringing you impressions and an in-depth review in the next few weeks. From our brief hands-on so far, it feels good in the hands and is actually smaller than I expected (from what I can tell it’s quite a bit smaller than a Steam Deck). It has good feeling triggers, bumpers, a nice D-Pad and hall effect analogue sticks which means there will be no stick drift.
It’s definitely an exciting time in the portable gaming space.