It's taken a while but at long last, Ayaneo handheld gaming PCs can now be purchased in the US from a local retailer, bypassing the need to go down the import route. The retailer in question is Best Buy but at the moment, it's only offering two of Ayaneo's enormous portfolio of PCs.
Even if you only have a passing interest in handheld gaming PCs, you will have almost certainly heard of Ayaneo. The Chinese manufacturer has only been around for four years but its catalogue of handheld, mini, retro, and pocket gaming PCs has taken the market by storm.
We're big fans of Ayaneo's Air 1S, with its diminutive size, it's a genuine PC-in-your-pocket. It's somewhat hard to believe that there's a Ryzen 7 7840U stuffed inside the tiny package but if there's one thing that Ayaneo's really good at, it's taking AMD's APUs and using them to power all kinds of different form factors.
Take the Ayaneo Retro Mini AM02, for example. It looks very much like an old Nintendo Entertainment System but it's actually a full-blown PC, with up to 64 GB of RAM and 1 TB of SSD storage.
However, if you're a US resident, getting your hands on one was somewhat tricky, as none of the usual tech retailers stocked them. Pretty much the only option was to find a seller who was willing to import them. Well, here's some good news at last and it's timed perfectly to coincide with Labor Day.
Best Buy now has Ayaneo handheld gaming PCs in stock, although the selection on offer is rather small—the Kun and the Next Lite. We reviewed the Ayaneo Kun earlier this year and found it to be almost the ultimate for handheld PC gaming. Unfortunately, our review sample had far too many quirks to justify its rather hefty $999 price—don't get me wrong, it's very good but compared to how good the OLED Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally X are, it's just not good enough.
Best Buy's other Ayaneo model, the Next Lite, is at the other scale of things—$400 gets you a handheld with a seven-inch, 800p screen and an old, Zen 2-based Ryzen 7 4800U processor. That's fine for basic gaming or anything that doesn't use lots of modern 3D graphics, but you're unlikely to be enjoying a few hours of Baldur's Gate 3 on it.
Hopefully, Best Buy will get some other models in, such as the Air 1S, 2S, or maybe even the new Snapdragon-powered Pocket Evo. Given what Ayaneo has achieved in just a handful of years, I suspect that other US retailers will be jumping in on the action too.
