Aya Neo Air Plus: Introduced Inexpensive Alternative to the Steam Deck

With the Neo Air Plus, Aya will soon be launching a brand new handheld for PC games. The technical equipment is okay and the price is far below that of the Steam Deck.

In the just announced handheld des Manufacturer Aya the equally new Mendocino chip from AMD is used, which is quite similar to the Aerith chip working in the Steam Deck. Although it offers better energy efficiency thanks to its design, it cannot keep up with the Steam Deck chip on the APU side, so it is a bit below in terms of performance.

Again, no OLED panel

Well, it would probably be a bit too much to ask for the asking price, but even the Neo Air Plus only has an LCD screen with a size of six inches and a maximum resolution of 1080p. A compatible M.2 SDD serves as the hard drive, and the memory can be expanded using a microSD card. The operating system is either the in-house Linux-based Ayaneo OS, and according to the manufacturer it can also be equipped with Steam or Windows.

Competition for the Steam Deck?

On paper, the performance of the Aya Neo Air Plus is almost on par with the Steam Deck, but only almost. Whether and which compromises have to be made due to the underlying hardware cannot currently be proven – because the Neo Air Plus has yet to go into production. For this reason, a Kickstarter campaign should follow in the next few weeks. At a price of less than 300 euros, there are certainly numerous supporters here.