by The Ayaneo Kun almost the king of gaming handhelds. I mean, that’s what the company is aiming for with a name like that, and it’s so damn good, but it’s the little things that make me unreservedly recommend it as the best.
I had to remove it almost completely to replace one of the things that gave me pause during my time testing the powerful mint-highlight device to replace a tiny rubber grommet. Then I pick it up again, its big, bright screen looming over me, its luscious curves pressing into my grip, and I go back to playing my PC games on a setup that feels more mobile than any gaming laptop I’ve ever seen. I used.
One of the things I’ve enjoyed watching the handheld market over the last 12 months is the level of tinkering that companies have done to create many different devices based on essentially the same silicon. The AMD Ryzen 7 7840U chip (and sometimes the Ryzen Z1 Extreme) is the SoC de jour for almost every handheld you can buy now. We’re starting to see some Intel Meteor Lake offerings, but for the most part AMD has a monopoly on your handheld hardware.
So, manufacturers have done other things. Ayaneo itself has many different devices, from the tiny Air 1S, to its Flip in two different designs, and the Slide. The Kun may be the most traditional of the lot, but it has its own claim to innovation, and the unique 54W mode on its 30W APU is just one of them. It’s chunky too, with a big 8.4-inch screen, but in a Steam Deck-y way it still feels good in the hand and I spent many an hour lying in bed playing Baldur’s Gate 3 on this gorgeous machine without my hands falling out
Specifications Kun
APU: AMD Ryzen 7 7840U
iGPU: Driver for Radeon 780m
Memory: 16|32|64GB LPDDR5-7500
Storage: 512GB|1TB|2TB|4TB SSD
Screen: 8-inch IPS
Resolution: 2560 x 1600
Battery: 75Wh
Price: $1329 (32GB/2TB unit)
It’s also the only handheld I’ve seen so far to use a couple of trackpads and run with it. The Kun’s size means he can get away with sticking two pads, one below the left D-pad and the other under the right thumb. At first they were all kind of unusable, but a recent update has made the trackpads much more responsive and much more like the type of keyboard you’d find on a laptop. You just, you know, Seriously little.
When using a Windows based handheld they are very handy but for ease of navigation in those annoying launchers that firmly adhere to the idea that if you are playing a PC game you will be using a mouse as your primary input no matter what. I get it, I love a good gaming mouse, too, but it makes a handheld gig tougher.
The central detail itself is impressive; alongside the ubiquitous Ryzen 7 7840U and its 780M iGPU, I have 32GB of LPDDR5-7500 and a 2TB Lexar SSD, giving me an eight-core, 16-thread machine with a truly powerful PC core. That’s not necessarily what you want from a handheld where portability and battery life are the bigger priorities than straight-line performance – just ask the Steam Deck OLED – but Ayaneo has also packed a big battery into the Kun .
That means that we are able to get within a slice of silicon of two hours in the PCMark 10 gaming battery life test, even running the machine at 30W.
In terms of gaming performance, however, I might have expected a bit more. Ayaneo has achieved a lot for its cooling and its mega 54W TDP limits, but no matter what I am not getting industry leading gaming performance from the device. Even against handhelds with the same core specification, such as the OneXPlayer 2 Pro, it is generally ahead.
It’s definitely up there, and you’ll get impressive 1080p gaming performance if you optimize the game’s settings – and rarely doable 1440p frame rates – but never better.
Best of all, though, is in the configuration software. Ayaneo has the best overall software for handheld control out there, even compared to the deep integration valve between SteamOS and Deck. That allows you to tailor your experience depending on what you’re playing to get as much battery life out of the Kun as possible while still enjoying a healthy frame rate.
If I want the full power of the AMD APU I can leave it at 30W and push the Radeon 780M graphics chip to the maximum, or if I’m going around Sword Coast via GeForce Now I can let it down to a measly 5W TDP and have the battery last for an age.
But, if you want the FULL power of the AMD APU Ayaneo it gives you that 54W mode…which I cannot recommend in all good conscience. Not because of the fact that it hoses through your battery, or that it gets great doing it, but because it doesn’t do anything. Well, nothing good. If there were situations where you got another 10% performance it would be a great docking method that you could deal with while plugged into the wall, but it’s not. Occasionally I saw a few extra frames per second for balls to the wall in terms of power jamming into the Ryzen silicon, but more often than not, gaming benchmarks lagged behind when I pushed it. as I called it ‘Extreme’. ‘ mode in the AyaSpace app.
My first impression on getting it out of the gorgeous packaging was: “Wow.” My second was: “That D-pad is sticky and gross.”
I also found that it left the device in a rather fragile state, function-wise. I seemed to experience more instability and flakiness when switching between the 54W mode and more sensible presets. In the end it has been renamed from ‘Extreme’ to ‘Unwise’ and I probably won’t be using it again.
Which is a shame, because overall the device itself is a joy to use and I was expecting some serious performance gains. It feels great in the hand – although I’ve recently been reminded again of how flat Valve’s machine is to my Steam Deck OLED and its excellent standard performance. It is a handheld that has almost the perfect premium aesthetic. I love the way it looks… but there are definitely things that let it down.
The most obvious is the D-pad. My first impression on getting it out of the gorgeous packaging was: “Wow.” My second was: “That D-pad is sticky and gross.”
Buy if…
✅ You need a large screen handheld computer: The Kun is big, but really quite beautifully made. The 2560 x 1600 resolution is a bit much for the iGPU 780M, but the 8-inch scale is missing and the game is delightful.
✅ You’re after a device that looks good: I mean, so, he’s a real observer. Especially in that white with blue-fading-to-green highlights. Yum.
Do not buy if…
❌ You expect perfection: At this price, you should be kinda quick and annoying to niggle still down the line.
❌ You expected to kill that 54W mode: It doesn’t deliver the extra performance I was hoping would put it above the competition in terms of gaming.
In fact the D-pad is so sticky that Ayaneo had to issue a fix due to a “manufacturing defect in the gasket.” And you need to remove your device almost completely to get to the back of the D-pad to replace the small rubber discs that sit below the rocker itself. Ayaneo is shipping the fix to anyone who’s interested, which is great, but it takes a lot of disassembly that I can see people being uncomfortable doing with their $1,300+ engine.
While it gives you a good look on the inside, it looks just as high from the side as well. I wish the D-pad wasn’t still so sticky even after all that fiddling.
And, while the 2560 x 1600 screen is very bright it lacks a certain color, which had me digging into the Radeon settings to boost the saturation a bit to compensate. It’s also only a 60Hz panel, which certainly helps battery life, but not the premium aesthetic.
Those little frustrations, and the basically similar flakiness of the 54W mode, which means that I can’t give good praise as the ultimate premium handheld of today that I expected when I started play with it first. It’s still a great device, with the absolute best Windows software of any handheld around, and it’s one I’ll continue to use. But Ayaneo wants you to swallow a few very durable foibles along with its high price tag, and I want it to be perfect for that kind of money.
