Share with others:
Ayaneo Kun: Beats Steam Deck on paper
The market for portable gaming devices is becoming more and more competitive, and Ayaneo wants to compete with Valve's Steam Deck with the new Kun model. The main drawback of the Steam Deck is the battery autonomy, which Ayaneo Kun intends to improve with a more powerful battery with a capacity of 75 watt hours. This is almost double the size of the Steam Deck, so it promises more than three hours of operation at 15W TDP.
The Kun also boasts impressive technical specifications, including a large 8.4-inch IPS display with a resolution of 2560 x 1600 and a brightness of 500 nits. The device also includes larger handles, two trackpads and more buttons. Under the hood, it's powered by an AMD Ryzen 7840U chip, supported by extensive cooling that allows turbo mode up to 54 watts, although the manufacturer advises against using this setting for everyday use.
Kun also offers a slot for a full-length M.2 2280 SSD for up to 8TB of internal storage, while competing devices typically limit storage to 2TB. Pricing for the Kun starts at $1,209 for 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, but can go up to $1,949 for the 64GB RAM version paired with a 4TB SSD. That's significantly more than the Steam Deck's starting price of $400 for 64GB of eMMC storage.
Ayaneo is setting high expectations for high-end portable gaming devices with the Kun model, but it will be interesting to see if gamers are willing to pay a premium for these improvements. The question is also how the Windows system will perform, which is not known as the most optimized system on such consoles.
