While many of you may be waiting for AYN to finally ship your AYN Odin after waiting many months, and constantly being teased by their weekly production updates you’ll be glad to know that they are launching another handheld.
To our surprise AYN have officially teased their next handheld and have name it Loki, along with a tease stating it’s “the worlds most affordable Windows handheld”.
Not only are they doing this to annoy ANBERNIC after their Wind600 announcement, I feel like they are specifically aim to take a piece of AYA Neo’s pie, especially after their reveal of the AYA Neo Air recently.
Obviously, they’ll be looking to target the Steam Deck too, but I personally feel the Steam Deck is going to be a totally different demographic.
The AYN Loki is going to be “affordable”, which could mean anywhere between $100 – $500, but looking at AYN’s past and the $289 price tag of the AYN odin, it could in fact be closer to $250 depending on what processor and tech specs they use.
It’s likely they will have different editions of the AYN Loki, based on tech specs and upgrades. The Odin has this, for example Lite, Standard and Pro, so perhaps we will see the AYN Loki Lite, Standard and Pro too for those that are happy to spend more.
AYN Odin VS AYN Loki
The video is only 30 seconds long, and you only get to see the AYN Loki for 3 of those, so there isn’t much information to go over.
The visual differences are very minute. The AYN Loki looks to be all white, with white screen bezels, white buttons and possibly even white LEDs under the analogue stick and on the side grips.
If AYN promises to make this the world’s most affordable windows handheld then high-end specs might not be the priority of this handheld, instead it’s being built as an entry point for those wanting to explore the best handheld gaming PC’s.
We’ll admit the success of the AYN Odin has been incredible, and the demand for it has been overwhelming on the company, hence why they are struggling to get all orders out as swiftly as possibly, but they need to be wary about annoying current customers when launching new products so swiftly.
We’ve seen AYA Neo do this, and it’s a fast way of stopping their older handhelds from selling.
AYN Loki Pricing
The AYN Loki will be priced between $299 and $799, depending on what spec you choose.
AYN went to Facebook to reveal their pricing but it shows a wide range of different models, which worries me slightly as i know that AYN are a small production company, so having to manage all of the orders and models could end up being a complete nightmare!
So let’s take a look at the leak. Wow, 5 different variants, under 3 different names. It seems the Loki Mini will cost only $299 and features an Intel Alder Lake CPU and 64GB of Memory. Is 64GB enough, absolutely not, is it AYN’s way of gaining the title “the world’s most affordable Windows handheld”, yes absolutely.
The base model looks the most interesting, featuring a AMD 6600U CPU and a RDN2 GPU with 64GB – 512GB of memory. This is likely to be expandable via an SD card.
There is also a “Max’ version which may come with some extra goodies, perhaps a new exclusive design and an upgrade AMD 6800U CPU.
So even though they have one handheld which is “affordable”, in reality the base Loki handheld is actually far more expensive than the Steam Deck, should this information be correct. Only time will tell, perhaps this was all a marketing ploy to get us interested!
If they can pull this off, and price it under $300 while packing a punch, this could be a great product for PC enthusiasts, and it opens up more gamers to the handheld industry, which we absolutely love.
The portable PC market is getting more competitive by the day, but this one excites us, only because the AYN Odin is currently one of the best retro handhelds on the market, even if it is Android based.
Some users have got Windows to work on this thing, but this is AYN’s first shot and supplying need to this market for an affordable price.
AYN Loki Release Date & Pre-Orders
The AYN Loki is launching in late 2022 and pre-orders went live on the 1st June, selling out in just a few hours.
This is only because there’s only a small amount of nits available for batch one, there will be more batches launching soon.
We’ll update this article with more information once we hear from them.
