Ayaneo Pocket S review: Expensive handheld gaming (2024)

The era of handheld gaming consoles is in full swing, and everyone wants to be your favorite handheld console manufacturer. The Steam Deck and ROG Ally are some of the first options we ever had, but over the past couple of years, the competition created pressure to improve. As a result, we’ll see more capable portable gaming devices emerge, including some meant to look and act almost identically to the Game Boy Advance. Ayaneo’s Pocket S, a new console joining the handheld ranks, made waves when it was announced as the most powerful Android gaming handheld to date. Its spec list is not insignificant, but neither is its price.

Ayaneo Pocket S

7/ 10

$399 $559 Save $160

The Ayaneo Pocket S combines a great portable form factor with unprecedented gaming handheld power. This is the first portable Android console to feature the Qualcomm Snapdragon G3x Gen 2 chipset, which supports seamless emulation and gorgeous stream-based gaming. Plus, 7 hours of battery life in a gaming handheld of this caliber is quite impressive.

Pros

• Hall effect triggers
• Great battery life for a handheld
• Gorgeous display
• Handles 60 fps smoothly

Cons

• No 3.5mm jack
• Gets really hot with more intensive games
• Software is rough

$399 at Ayaneo

Price, availability, and specs

The Ayaneo Pocket S is available for pre-order through Indiegogo. It comes in black or white, with a 1080p or 1440p screen and storage options include 128GB, 512GB, and 1TB. There are two LPDDR5X RAM options: 16GB or 12GB.

The Pocket S's MSRP ranges from $559 to $799, including all of these versions plus a limited-release unmarked version. However, there are early bird deals during pre-orders. For this review, I've been testing the 1440p, 16GB, 512GB edition.

What’s good about the Ayaneo Pocket S?

Most of the Pocket S’s value is in the Snapdragon G3x Gen 2 chipset

The Ayaneo Pocket S is remarkably built. Even if this handheld lacked in every other aspect, it sets the bar on build quality for future Ayaneo handhelds and competing devices. It’s about the shape of a Switch Lite (but a touch longer), with a 6-inch borderless screen dominating the front.

The size is a nice step down from my Steam Deck when I want portability or a lighter weight. However, the controls on both sides are all in-line and generally pretty tightly arranged, so folks with bigger hands or longer fingers may find the layout a challenge.

While on the smaller side, the Pocket S is hefty, featuring metal framework plus a full glass panel on the front. The battery life is excellent compared to other handhelds. With a greater internal battery capacity than the Steam Deck, the Nintendo Switch, and the Asus ROG Ally, the Pocket S lasts about 5 to 7 hours, depending on settings.

The Pocket S is currently the most powerful Android handheld you can buy. Sluggishness, stuttering, and lag were never an issue. I especially liked the toggle that flicks the Pocket S into a high-performance mode. Sticking to 60fps with mostly high graphics settings, the Pocket S’s display and power are truly commendable.

However, you can play in the console’s balanced mode, which moderates settings to maintain a smoother framerate and longer battery life.

The Ayaneo Pocket S got quite warm during just about every test session, whether emulating, streaming, or playing a native app like Genshin Impact. While it handled internal temperature fine — thanks to both active cooling and a vapor chamber under the hood — the heat radiating off the back and sides was noticeable.

Fan volume isn't unbearable, but you’ll turn heads on a quiet subway or in a library when the Pocket S starts breaking a sweat. And the console's maximum volume isn't loud enough to drown the fan out, so it’s still really noticeable as it picks up speed if you're playing without a headset.

Customizable inputs allow you to play just about any game with your choice of touch controls or hardware buttons. For example, you can map out different zones of the touch screen and register them to the physical controls. Then, when a physical control is pressed, a corresponding input happens in the touch zone for that control. It’s a rudimentary translation and has limitations, but it still helps make certain games more playable.

The same is true in reverse: You can put overlays of the AXBY keys, D-pad, and analog sticks on the touchscreen, and touching the overlays registers an input to the corresponding control. Again, it’s not bulletproof, especially with the joysticks, but a great option if you find one type of control to be particularly buggy on a certain game, or just need a different form of input for convenience, hand size, or accessibility.

What’s bad about the Ayaneo Pocket S?

A learning curve that may scare casual users away

Gamers only familiar with closed-system consoles, like Valve’s Steam Deck or the Nintendo Switch, should expect a steep learning curve. Emulators can already be tricky to master, and the Pocket S doesn’t streamline that process much.

To make matters worse, at the time of testing, the Ayaneo Pocket S was not Google Play Protect certified, so Play Store apps weren't usable. I know there are ways to circumvent this, but I sincerely hope this certification issue is fixable in time for widespread use. Even the Ayaneo Pocket Air, a cheaper Android handheld we thoroughly enjoyed, didn't share this issue.

The experience also isn't without bugs. One major issue was the controls seizing up when exiting some apps, the main perpetrators being Steam Link and the Dolphin Emulator. Ayaneo confirmed that this is a matter of certain apps taking exclusive control of the handheld’s controller. While the brand said fully closing the app or putting the screen to sleep and then waking it back up would rectify this, the only fix that worked for me was fully rebooting.

The device’s settings are fragmented into Android menus and Ayaneo's own AYA menus. The latter is mostly used for quick access to frequent settings, though the selection is odd: account information and software updates make sense, but there are stranger inclusions like changing the system language (how often are you going to do that?) and switching between international and Chinese servers. It lacks key settings like the internet menu, while others are half-available through the AYA settings menu (for example, you can calibrate the joysticks here but not change the sensitivity).

Should you buy it?

In a few ways, the Pocket S impressed me but disappointed me in others. The hardware runs hot, and the Play Protect restriction seems unacceptable, even if it’s just an early-stage setback. The Pocket S is an okay but expensive emulator. It does an excellent job of scaling up old-school GameCube, PlayStation 2, and similar games, and the handheld’s built-in Pegasus and Emulation Station launcher may come in handy for you. But there are other emulation consoles out there that perform just as well, plus several that lower the steep learning threshold, and I’m not sure you need all of the Pocket S’s horsepower just for emulation.

I'm a huge fan of retro games, so I willingly invested the necessary time into the Pocket S and overcame its current flaws. Plenty of other gamers out there are willing to do the same and maybe even consider this device an opportunity to tinker and test out solutions.

However, casual players who want a device capable of streaming games or just efficiently running mobile Android titles could be better off upgrading to a more powerful phone (if you don’t have one already), like the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, and picking up a mobile game controller and external cooling component. At least that way, you have a decent handheld gaming device, reliable Play Protect certification, and a daily driver phone.

There’s no way to sugarcoat it: the Ayaneo Pocket S is overpriced. A premium build quality is fuel for good momentum, but we’re missing the ignition spark that is a seamless and digestible user interface. I think this brand creates great consoles, but the cart sometimes comes before the horse. I just want Ayaneo to hold off on giving us a new device until it's polished inside and out.

Ayaneo Pocket S

The Ayaneo Pocket S is a powerful Android handheld gaming console. Specs vary by model, but with the option for 16 gigs of RAM and a 1440p display, coupled with a flagship Snapdragon chipset, this is one of the most powerful Android handhelds on the market.

Preorder from $400