The $900 Ayaneo 3 is the most exciting PC handheld the company’s yet made

Ayaneo builds the best-looking handheld PCs in the business, but they’ve always been boutique. The 2023 Ayaneo 2, for example, cost $1,300 for an arguably worse experience than the $400 Steam Deck. But that experience isn’t dampening my excitement for the new 7-inch Ayaneo 3.

Not only does this one start at $900, within striking distance of the highest-end handhelds you’ll find at retail, it’s the most feature-packed portable I’ve seen — with two USB4 ports and OcuLink and RGB-ringed Hall effect joysticks and your choice of two seemingly killer screens. Perhaps most exciting: a way to finally fix a handheld’s joystick and button layout to match your ergonomic preferences!

Ayaneo is calling the Ayaneo 3 “the world’s first modular handheld,” because there’ll be other modular options too. An extra $139 buys a set of six modules that let you swap out your joysticks for analog sticks, a six-button microswitch pad for fighting games, or even D-pads and face buttons with conductive silicone underneath for a different feel.

But importantly, that basic module that lets you change joystick and button orientation and swap joystick caps comes with the handheld by default, and it’s not the only feature Ayaneo is impressively cramming into the $900 kit.

While you’ll “only” get a Ryzen 8840U, 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM, and 512GB of storage that that price — no Z2 option, and the HX 370 model starts at $1500 — you do get your choice of OLED or IPS right away.

That OLED screen is a 1080p 144Hz HDR OLED panel promising 800 nits of global brightness and 110 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut, specs which suggest it could even beat the Steam Deck OLED’s excellent screen.

Like the Deck OLED, it unfortunately doesn’t have variable refresh rate for added smoothness — but if that’s important, the IPS panel option does! That one’s a 120Hz, 500-nit, native landscape 1080p display, according to the company, with 7ms response time and only 100 percent sRGB coverage (read: nowhere near as colorful as the OLED panel).

On top of all that, the Ayaneo 3 comes standard with both top and bottom USB4 ports, both of which are capable of 65W PD charging, plus the still-rare-on-handhelds Oculink port for eGPUs, and it takes full-length M.2 2280 SSDs for easy storage upgrades.

Plus, there’s a dedicated hardware mode switch on the bottom edge to switch the controller and virtual-mouse-and-keyboard modes. I doubt that will make up for the current state of Windows, but it could help! Also, new trigger locks for its Hall effect triggers, if you want to switch them into a hair trigger mode.

I do have a few hesitations, even without having touched the Ayaneo 3. First, the company says its modules electronically latch into the frame — you have to eject them by pressing a software button, which activates a motor to release the latch. Sounds potentially fiddly?

Second, I’m sorry to report that this 1.5-pound handheld only fits a 49 watt-hour battery, even though the Asus ROG Ally X manages to fit an 80 watt-hour pack into roughly the same weight. Fingers crossed, but I wouldn’t expect great battery life here with neither a giant battery pack nor a particularly handheld-optimized chip.

Lastly, it’s always important to point out that these products are crowdfunded, and while Ayaneo has a history of delivering its promised handhelds, they haven’t always been great — and this is the most ambitious one yet. If that sounds worthwhile, you can find the Ayaneo 3 on Indiegogo here.

The company says the handheld should ship at the end of April; here’s the whole price breakdown.