 Thanks to Artlist for sponsoring a portion of this video. Learn more about them later in the video. 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, mwah. But you better have an LTT backpack to carry it around in. LTTstore.com. But what's this? The same AMD Ryzen 5000 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 enthusiast's wish list. Hall effect joysticks, dual USB type C ports, up to two terabytes of internal storage, with 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, you're a game in. everything else suddenly looked downright overpriced by comparison. But this little guy right here, only $630 US. And inside you'll find 16 gigs of DDR4 RAM at 4,266 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 $100 cheaper than its 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 DCI-P3, 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 5.5-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 I.O. Both of the USB-C ports can be used for charging and connecting peripherals, including through a dock. And we also get a headset jack, a fingerprint sensor on the power button, and this convenient micro SD card slot for extra storage. Now you can upgrade the included internal M.2 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 thumbsticks, 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 Rollerdrome, 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 thumbsticks 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. And telling you about our sponsor. 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Or maybe you'll stick to AA or indie games. The reality is while the Ryzen 5560U and 5825U are both solid CPUs, their Vega graphics is holding them back in a big way compared to the Steam Deck and to the GPD Win Max 2, both of which are powered by RDNA 2 GPUs. To be clear, depending on your expectations, you may be perfectly happy running even modern AAA 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 AAA 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 Rollerdrome didn't so much as hiccup during prolonged gameplay, even when turned down to eight 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 IONEO 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 valves 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 going to pick the IONEO 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 IONEO model with AMD 6000 series processors like we saw in the GPD Win Max 2. 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 IaSpace 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 handhelds will run into the same issues. And I think it's fair to say that IaSpace 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 teardown 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 IONEO 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 DNA2 graphics is on the horizon and with it, the IONEO 2, 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 IONEO Air. Cause the thing is after trying out the 6800U and the Win Max 2, 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 2. 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.