Meet the budget handheld PCs set to undercut Valve’s $399 Steam Deck

techradar.com:

The Steam Deck is still a hot commodity right now, with its $399 (£349, around AU$560)  base price tag making it a very attractive prospect to gamers on the go. With the massive success of the Nintendo Switch, Valve’s handheld provides a portable option for PC gamers, but competition is surging across the market.

Still, the Steam Deck has managed to establish itself as the go-to choice for handheld PC gaming, largely in part to its lower price. Serious competitors, like the OneXPlayer Mini and the AyaNeo Next Advance, offer decent performance but come with a price in excess of a thousand dollars for the base unit.

However, AyaNeo has a new handheld PC in the works, named the AyaNeo Air Plus. A budget competitor to AyaNeo’s burgeoning range of Steam Deck imitators, the Air Plus is billed as the first handheld to run on AMD’s new Ryzen ‘Mendocino’ APUs. This chip runs on AMD’s Zen 2 architecture, with Radeon RDNA 2 graphics and a custom Linux-based OS designed by AyaNeo.

Other technical specs for the Air Plus are thin on the ground right now, but we do know that the unit will use a smaller 6-inch OLED screen than previous AyaNeo handhelds and the Steam Deck, which both rock a 7-inch display. The Air Plus uses a 1080p screen, however, a slightly higher resolution than the Steam Deck’s 1280 x 800.

The Air Plus will also use an M.2 2280 SSD for storage (in addition to a microSD card slot), a step up from the eMMC drive found in the cheapest version of the Steam Deck. This is assumed to be removable for easy upgrading, and should provide speedy load times in games.

AyaNeo is pricing the base model of the Air Plus at just $289 (£230, around AU$400), making it significantly cheaper than the Steam Deck (though still more expensive