AYANEO Next 2 (Ryzen AI Max+ 395)

The Next 2 is AYANEO doing what AYANEO does: taking the most powerful mobile silicon it can get its hands on and bolting a controller to either side of it. This time that means AMD's Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo" family, up to a 16-core Ryzen AI Max+ 395 with a 40-CU Radeon 8060S, paired with a 9.06-inch 165Hz OLED and a battery large enough that AYANEO itself warns it may need paperwork before you board a plane. On paper this is less a handheld console than a gaming PC you can hold, and the claimed performance in the RTX 4060 mobile ballpark would make it the fastest thing in the category by a comfortable margin.

It is emphatically not for everyone. At roughly 1.4kg it is heavier than most laptops people happily carry in a bag, let alone hold at arm's length, and the entry ticket is $1,799 before you reach either of the Max+ 395 configurations. The audience here is the enthusiast who wants one machine that plays modern PC games at high settings, docks over USB4 as a desktop, and — with 128GB of LPDDR5X on the top model — can plausibly moonlight for local AI work. Anyone shopping for a Steam Deck alternative to play indies on the sofa should look several hundred dollars down the market.

Judged on specification alone, the Next 2 is the most ambitious Windows handheld we've seen described. An 85W sustained TDP with dual fans and vapour-chamber fins suggests AYANEO is genuinely trying to feed the chip rather than quietly throttling it, the 116Wh battery is sized to match, and the OLED panel's 2400×1504 resolution, 165Hz ceiling and claimed 1,155 nits are flagship-tablet numbers rather than handheld compromises. The control hardware — torque-adjustable TMR sticks, Hall-effect linear triggers with dual-mode locks, twin touchpads, four rear buttons — reads like a spec sheet written by someone who actually plays everything from shooters to strategy games. Two PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots and dual USB4 ports are the kind of practical touches that keep a $2,000+ device useful for years.

The reservations are equally obvious. Weight and heat are the inescapable tax on this much silicon, and 1.4kg is a figure that will end a lot of extended handheld sessions early; a 116Wh pack feeding an 85W APU also implies battery life that is measured in a short number of hours at full tilt, whatever the capacity headline suggests. Pricing has clearly escaped AYANEO's control, with DRAM costs cited as a factor, and the jump to $3,499–$4,299 for the 128GB/2TB model takes it past most genuinely capable gaming laptops. Most importantly, this is an Indiegogo pre-order with overseas shipping only estimated for June 2026, and crowdfunded handhelds have a long history of slipping schedules and post-launch firmware and software rough edges — risk you're carrying on top of an already large deposit.

We're rating the concept and the specification here, not measured performance, battery life or thermals, none of which we've been able to verify. On that basis it earns real respect for ambition and apparent engineering seriousness, tempered heavily by the price, the mass and the unproven crowdfunding route to market. If you want the fastest handheld PC available and the cost is genuinely secondary, this is the one to watch; everyone else should wait for retail units and independent testing.