Ayaneo Slide Handheld Salutes Classic Gaming With A Full Keyboard And RDNA 3 Firepower
Are you nostalgic for the days of slide-up screens and hidden, physical keyboards on mobile devices? Do you deeply miss your Motorola Sidekick, beloved Blackberry, or LG Ally proto-smartphone? If you do, you're squarely in the target market for Ayaneo's new Slide handheld gaming PC, which is available for just $699 during crowdfunding. The system is part of the company's Remake collection that harkens back to earlier eras of device design.
The Ayaneo Slide is a Ryzen-powered PC gaming handheld, like the Steam Deck or Lenovo Legion Go, but this time with a sliding screen. Underneath the screen resides a small, but complete tenkeyless QWERTY keyboard. While typing on the touch screens present on other handhelds works well enough, it's undeniably clumsy in comparison to having a real physical keyboard. The display on the Slide can be adjusted to sit at up to a 15º angle from flat, too.
The screen itself sports some pretty impressive specifications. It's relatively small at just 6", but it still comes in 1920×1080 resolution, giving it an extremely sharp 368 PPI, similar to many smartphones. Ayaneo promises a 1000:1 contrast ratio with 400 nits max brightness too, which is fairly typical for an IPS-type LCD. The company also claims 100% sRGB coverage, which is better than the Steam Deck's LCD. Ayaneo doesn't mention touch capability for the screen, but that would be a surprising omission, so we've asked the company about it. (UPDATE: Ayaneo got back to us and confirmed that the screen is touch-capable.)
Besides the fancy display, the Ayaneo Slide has a few other tricks up its sleeve. Both of the analog sticks as well as the triggers use Hall-effect sensors, which means there's no physical actuation mechanism to fail, meaning they should last longer than typical mechanical sensors. It boasts a 46.2-Wh battery, too—smaller than the Steam Deck OLED, but then, this is a considerably smaller device, too.
The SoC inside the Ayaneo Slide is a Ryzen 7 7840U, a "15-30W" processor that's really meant for laptops. It has eight Zen 4 CPU cores and an RDNA 3-based GPU with twelve compute units; if that sounds familiar, that's because this is fundamentally the same silicon that you'll find inside many other handhelds, including the ASUS ROG Ally as well as most of Ayaneo's own recent devices, like the KUN.
As such, despite the big battery, we wouldn't expect amazing battery life out of this machine while gaming, but Ayaneo does have its own performance management utility (above) that should allow you to tune game performance to your liking so that you can keep playing longer when away from a power outlet.
If you get in right now and take advantage of the early bird pricing, the base configuration with 16GB of memory and a 512GB SSD will run $699, which is the same price as a Steam Deck OLED with double the storage. However, for another $100 you can snag the system with 32GB of RAM—a bigger benefit than you might think given the shared memory configuration. Another $160 on top of that (bringing the total to $960) gets you an Ayaneo Slide with 32GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD, and finally there's an excessive top-end configuration with 64GB of RAM and a 4TB SSD for $1299.
