AYANEO NEXT Lite launching soon as Steam Deck competitor with SteamOS

AYANEO has returned the NEXT series, six months after it last provided an update about the NEXT II. To recap, the company claimed that it developed the NEXT II to dissipate up to 100 W in heat from an AMD Ryzen 7000 APU and a discrete GPU. While details about the latter remain unknown, we presume AYANEO will switch out the former for a newer Ryzen 8000 successor. By contrast, AYANEO states that the NEXT Lite will rely on more modest hardware.

Specifically, the NEXT Lite will utilise the an AMD APU, possibly something like the Ryzen 5 7640U. For reference the Ryzen 5 7640U is a less powerful alternative to the Ryzen 7 7840U and Ryzen 7 8840U that contains 6 CPU cores, 12 threads and a Radeon 760M iGPU. In other words, the NEXT Lite should mirror the performance levels of the Ryzen Z1, which is currently limited to the cheapest ASUS ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go. Additionally, the NEXT Lite is said to feature a 7-inch LCD screen that resolves at 1,280 x 800 pixels in a 16:10 aspect ratio.

Moreover, it has also confirmed that the gaming handheld will do without certain features seen on some of its devices, such as trackpads, rear-mounted buttons and backlit analogue sticks. Despite not acknowledging as much on its website, it appears that AYANEO has designed the NEXT Lite to compete directly with the Steam Deck, which received a mid-generation OLED refresh at the end of last year. To that end, the NEXT Lite will ship with SteamOS rather than Windows, a decision that should reduce its manufacturing costs by eliminating Microsoft's licensing fees. AYANEO will reveal more details about the NEXT Lite later this week.

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