Lenovo's new handheld may have been manufactured by Ayaneo, and there's proof

Lenovo launched a new handheld in late August called the Legion C700. The handheld, which is currently exclusive to China, was made in partnership with Tencent, and is designed mainly for streaming games from Tencent's Start cloud gaming service. While there's been no report of an international version, the device has made its way into the hands of the YouTuber, ETA Prime, and in his hands-on video, he discovered a surprising detail.

Lenovo isn't new to making handhelds, as it has a few already such as the Legion Go, Legion Go S (available on Amazon for $695.16), and Legion Go 2. However, it seems the development of the Legion C700 wasn't made up of just Lenovo and Tencent teams. In his hands-on video, ETA Prime discovered a few details that reveal Ayaneo, a popular Chinese handheld manufacturer, may have had a role in the development of the Legion C700.

The first is a feature called FPS Thunder, which can be accessed via the performance menu on the Legion C700. This overlay tool, which shows real-time information about the handheld during gameplay, is also available on Ayaneo devices, and it goes by the same name.

The second proof of Ayaneo's involvement was found during the installation of the Streamhost software needed for low-latency streaming from a computer to the Legion C700. When the program is installing, the Command prompt installer reveals the software is being downloaded from a specific URL, and a look at the link shows it is from an Ayaneo server.

While these two proofs mentioned by ETA Prime are software based, we spotted two others that are hardware-related.

If you take a close look at the Lenovo Legion C700, it has some design similarities to some of Ayaneo handhelds such as the Ayaneo Kun and Ayaneo Next 2. First, the arrangement of the buttons of the Legion C700 and that of the aforementioned Ayaneo Windows handhelds are very much alike, bar the absence of the circular touchpads. In addition, the floating 8-way D-pad of the Legion C700 seems to have been lifted from these Ayaneo devices.

It is obvious that Ayaneo played a key role in the development of the Lenovo Legion C700. However, we do not expect Lenovo or even Ayaneo to reveal or admit that is the case, but it is interesting nonetheless to know that Lenovo didn't design this on its own.