The Ayaneo Kun nearly doubles the Steam Deck’s battery for nearly twice the price

theverge.com:

By Sean Hollister, a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.

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The Steam Deck’s biggest weakness is battery life — and yet somehow, every challenger has failed to raise that bar. The Ayaneo 2 showed us that AMD’s Ryzen 6800U wasn’t ready to compete; the Asus ROG Ally revealed that AMD’s Z1 Extreme couldn’t pull ahead if Asus insisted on matching the Steam Deck’s 40 watt-hour battery pack.

But Ayaneo may have an answer: it’s stuffing a 75 watt-hour pack into a larger, heavier handheld called the Ayaneo Kun that — it now claims — can last nearly three and a quarter hours at 15W TDP. That’s nearly double the battery and runtime you’d expect from a Steam Deck at that wattage, though it appears it wasn’t captured while playing a game, exactly.

We’ve mentioned the Ayaneo Kun on The Verge a couple of times before, but today the company revealed its full array of features, price, expected ship window, and that you’ll be able to crowdfund it on September 5th if you’re willing to pay with no guarantees.

Personally, I’d wait. But there’s no question that this handheld has the strongest spec sheet yet — starting with a comparatively large 8.4-inch, 2560 x 1600, 500-nit, 90 percent DCI-P3 color IPS screen.

Ayaneo seems to have heard how some people prefer the Steam Deck’s ergonomics and loads of buttons to its own previous handhelds, too — so the Kun adds bigger grips, dual touchpads (each with four distinct buttons underneath), quad back buttons, beefier triggers, and even a little kickstand reminiscent of the original