Ayaneo Flip Gaming Handheld Ships Soon With Full Keyboard Or Dual Screen Options
The next product in Ayaneo's Remake collection, which pays homage to gaming hardware of years past, has just launched. Known as the Flip, this handheld gaming PC actually comes in two forms that are fundamentally similar, yet have one big difference. They sport gorgeous 7" 120Hz LCD screens, Hall-effect inputs, and the latest AMD hardware. Let's take a look.
Meanwhile, the Flip DS comes with a 3.5" touch-enabled secondary screen in 960×540 resolution. This is actually a fairly revolutionary feature for these Windows gaming handhelds. Ayaneo says that it's a "native Windows extended display", likely meaning that Windows sees the second display simply as a second monitor. However, there are all kinds of dedicated functions for it in the Ayaneo software, including performance monitoring and customization, quick toggles for wireless connectivity and audio volume, easy shortcuts to apps, and more. Of course, the second screen also makes it arguably the very best device for emulating the Nintendo DS.
Besides your choice of keyboard or screen, both Ayaneo Flip models are essentially identical. You get a full set of Hall-effect gamepad controls, an "optical finger navigation mouse" that seems similar to a trackpoint, and the aforementioned 7" primary display that refreshes at 120 Hz. That's an IPS LCD in 1920×1080 resolution, by the way. Ayaneo says it has a 1200:1 contrast ratio and 120% coverage of the sRGB color space, which are both impressive specs for a handheld.
Inside these little beasties you'll find some pretty high-end AMD hardware. There are two options: a Ryzen 7 7840U, or a Ryzen 7 8840U. These parts are exactly identical in every single way, except that the Ryzen 7 8840U has a more powerful NPU—60% faster, by AMD's reckoning. Fittingly, the 8840U models aren't much more expensive than the 7840U models. Either way, you end up with eight Zen 4 CPU cores that will bost to 5.1 GHz, and six RDNA 3 WGPs. These get mated to your choice of 16, 32, or 64GB of LPDDR5X memory. Ayaneo didn't specify the RAM clock, but says that it will be "Highest LPDDR5X High-Frequency Memory", which could be 8400 MT/s or faster.
Starting price is $699 for the cheapest model; that's a Flip KB with the Ryzen 7 7840U, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD. Stepping up to 32GB of RAM also quadruples the storage to 2TB; the price increases accordingly to $959. The Flip DS is consistently $40 more expensive than the Flip KB at every price point, with the absolute most expensive model running $1279 for a Flip DS with 64GB of RAM, a 2TB SSD, and a Hawk Point SoC.
These prices are all early bird prices, though. As usual, Ayaneo is selling the device through Indiegogo, and if you want to lock in an early bird price, you'll have to go slap down a pre-order. The pricing will increase once the early bird allotments are gone, and once again after these devices hit secondary channels, so seriously, if you want an Ayaneo Flip, you'd better head over to the Ayaneo page and get to pre-orderin'.
