Over the holiday weekend, Ayaneo announced the Next II, a Windows-based handheld gaming PC. It looks beefy, full-featured and, from here, a whole lot like an overpowered, probably very expensive Steam Deck running a worse operating system.
The Ayaneo Next II features a 9-inch, up-to 165Hz OLED display with a 2400×1504 resolution and a peak brightness of 1100 nits. The company says it’s powered by an AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 chipset – the same powerful chip used by the Asus ROG Flow Z13 gaming laptop, which earned a 9/10 for its impressive gaming performance in IGN’s review earlier this year. The Next II has an 85W thermal design power (TDP), or roughly how high its power consumption ceiling is. It’s also got dual cooling fans, and a 115Wh battery – a huge gain over the original Next, which had just a 47Wh battery. It also outdoes the 80Wh capacity of the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X. Whether that translates to longer life between charges remains to be seen, though, especially with that 85W TDP.
Taking a page from Valve’s book, Ayaneo put two touch pads on the front of the Next II, which the company writes “support customizable key mapping and intuitive gesture control.” Otherwise, the console has two Hall effect joysticks, Hall effect triggers with two-stage trigger locks, four bumper buttons, four face buttons, and four configurable rear buttons. And there’s an 8-way D-pad that looks similar to the one Microsoft uses on its Xbox Wireless Controller. It’s a lot.
It sounds like Ayaneo is going hard with this handheld – nearly everything about it sounds like the company is trying to one-up every handheld on the market today. Ayaneo didn’t say when the Next II is coming out or offer pricing information, but the company isn’t shy about pricing premium handhelds like, well, premium handhelds (See the $1,265 starting price of the Ayaneo Next Advance).
