So I found out about something very interesting recently.

Turns out, the handheld space is much more massive than I thought it was, but not for the reason most people would expect : there's the Deck of course, and all the derivatives with AMD Z1/Z2 APUs, some models with Intel chips, and then... there's a butt load of Android handhelds with ARM APUs ?? AYANEO, Ayn, Retroid... surprising amount of brands and models available all around and they're (relatively) quite powerful too!

my insatiable love for powerful hardware being what it is, I was looking for the most powerful unit around (spending a little extra for overkill horsepower saved my ass down the road so many times...) and surprisingly, it doesn't cost so much: an AYN Odin 3 or a KONKR Pocket FIT Elite* (this one is yet to be released, Soon™) pack a Snapdragon 8 Elite with various RAM/storage/color options and are about 450€/$ (for the 16GB+512GB version, which is just a tad more than the Deck's base model, yet the features are much more fleshed out

**(The Pocket FIT is declined in two version, the Elite with an SD8 Elite, and the G3 with an SD8 gen3, the later being the same chip the Steam Frame VR headset packs in)*

They both have 1080p screens and are sorta-kinda 1080p gaming capable (debatable although still massively impressive), some madlads found out you can run Steam/steam games -with native cloud saves!- on it somehow (using an app called GameHub)

The Odin 3 has an OLED screen but lacks a ton of the extra features the Pocket FIT Elite has, reviews for both are glowing (even though the Pocket FIT is LCD, I'm being told it's a VERY good LCD) and parsing through subreddits and youtube taught me the Android-based emulation environment is very, VERY fleshed out and has incredibly matured (FOSS for the win!)

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Some of you may remember my past posts about my DIY Steam Machine, my GeekCube, which I wanted to build a sort of "ecosystem" around, a portable-capable gaming kit with all of the bells & whistles of modern gaming, which of course would include a handheld to stream games from it and discovering this massive handheld environment I knew nothing about that has all of that compute power and all this gaming capability expanded my horizons massively!

I was considering running emulators from my Cube but having an ARM handheld that can run emulators natively with high performance and a battery to match long play sessions (8000mAh+), this is the absolute dream! I'm gonna clear so many games from my backlog, namely the Ace Combat games prior to AC7, the PS3 games of the Ratchet & Clank series, etc... It's amazing!

Going back to PC streaming, seeing how low compute that is and how efficient these APUs are for transcoding and AV1 capable with wireless capabilities to match, I'm gonna get SO MUCH milage out of this, I haven't been so excited about hardware in a while, discovering this new branch of devices I knew almost nothing about is certainly gonna keep me busy for a while! I'm even considering writing another one of my TechPowerUp "articles" about those, that's fun!

One thing though, looks like "being late to the party" was actually a lucky break for me in hindsight, the Konkr Pockets were funded through an IndieGoGo campaign and apparently Ayaneo's handling of their delays and bad QC has been abyssmal to say the least but it's 80% sorted out (gut feeling estimation after gleaning information left and right) so it looks like that's still on track to release for early March and if it still shits the bed and lose patience (though I rarely do somehow, I'm strangely patient with that kind of thing) I could always settle on the Odin 3, which is already apparently fairly mature as a product (plus it went through several production batches and has likely received a lot of software updates)