Even if the IA NEO slide was the worst product ever,
which it's not, I probably still love it because this is the cutest packaging
that I think I have ever seen for anything ever. You slide a little VHS tape box out of a VHS tape sleeve
and inside you are getting one of the most unique handheld gaming PCs that we have seen yet.
We're expecting performance to be about on par
with devices like the Lenovo Legion Go and the Seuss ROG Ally,
since it's using a Ryzen 7 7840U,
which is functionally the same as the Z1 Extreme except it has some additional AI nonsense bolted onto it.
But you are getting it in a form factor that might be a little bit on the thick boy side,
but includes a full freaking physical keyboard.
I mean, that's one of the biggest pain points when you're using anything other than a Steam Deck.
Windows is just not designed to be used
with joysticks and buttons. And boom, having access to a keyboard like that,
combined with IA NEO's ISPAY software, which has pretty good joy to mouse
the last time that I touched it, should make it a lot easier to do things like
enter a product key or log into your Microsoft account
or just all that crap that you have to do with Windows.
Let's have a look at accessories real quick. All black, just matte black, absolutely everything.
Nice compact power brick. This bad boy will do up to 65 watts.
Love to see it. Also love that it uses a detachable cable
so that I'm not stuck with whatever length they happen to ship me.
Oh, various region adapters for the wall ward.
It looks like it comes with the North American one, pre-installed at least for me.
This is cool though. I also get a couple of USB-C to USB-A dongles.
This could either be useful, I guess, if I wanted to use a USB-A cable off of here.
They probably wouldn't do that. Or if I wanted to convert either of the device's
dual USB-C ports to a USB Type-A.
Let's pull these off so we can take a closer look. On the top, you're gonna find a fingerprint sensor
power button, volume rocker, one USB-C port.
This is USB-4, so might be able to use it
with some Thunderbolt accessories. Might not, your mileage may vary.
We've got a total of, ooh, those are,
they really do feel really nice. Two hall effect triggers, two regular shoulder buttons,
and then two additional L4R4 buttons?
I don't know, because this would be your threes and then normally four would be here, but it's not,
it's here. They're pretty hard to reach without accidentally touching the shoulders,
but if you have bigger hands, like I could see using them for something, I guess.
On the bottom, we've got another USB-4 port. I really like to have the option
of having it either plugged in the bottom or the top, because if you're sitting, the bottom is great,
instead of having it hanging off the top and kind of dragging it down.
But if you're lying in bed, having it come out the bottom is a great way to damage your cable.
Down here, there's also a micro SD slot and a couple of stereo speakers.
Kind of wish they were forward-facing, but Ayanio's done some pretty good stuff
with the audio on their devices in the past, so they might end up sounding pretty good.
On the face, we've got very serviceable ABX-Y buttons,
really nice compact form factor, especially considering how big
some of these devices have gotten lately. Look at you legion go.
These joysticks also hall effect with RGB accent lighting,
what feels immediately like a pretty serviceable D-pad, and then of course, your start select,
whatever those are on an Xbox controller and Ayanio space button, and a return to desktop button.
The big star of the show is, of course, the display,
and yes, that's right, you guys saw that.
The 30 degrees of tilt that Ayanio is extremely proud of.
Unlike previous similar devices that we've seen before,
like the GPD Win 4, this is A, more powerful,
and B, the first that we've seen that has a screen that tilts like this for they claim,
and honestly, I can't see any reason to doubt this,
improved ergonomics. Yeah, it means that I don't have to,
okay, you can't really see this because of the gorgeous dropout hoodie that I'm wearing, LTTstore.com,
but in order to be looking straight at the screen, I'd normally have to bend my wrist back at this angle.
Instead, they do the wrist bending for you, keeping you aligned while you're sitting at a desk
and resting your console on the surface of it.
Ah, this is a problem. While the display reached a whopping 500 nits,
that's 100 more than what they rate it for, and achieved pretty decent performance
when it comes to color accuracy, it's 60 Hertz, which is a big disadvantage
compared to the ROG Ally and the Steam Deck OLED, not to mention the Lenovo Legion Go,
though I don't know how many people are buying that one, but it is not touch screen.
After filming, we found out it's just our pre-production
unit that doesn't have a touch screen. Retail units do, thank goodness.
Let's go ahead and fire up a game, shall we? Holy crap, this fan moves air.
I guess that's one of the advantages of having a thicker body is you can put,
like, I can feel this blowing air, this friggin' far away from it.
That looks like a gigantic cooler. Okay, I guess now's a good time for us to talk
about the various performance modes that are available on this device.
Rather than just naming them after wattages, they've got AAA game mode, which runs at 23 watts,
but we turned all the way up to 28 watts so we could see exactly how much it could do in our testing.
They've got normal game mode, retro game mode,
and office mode, which are 20 watts, 15 watts,
and then nine watts, respectively. We are obviously in AAA game mode right now
because, A, this thing is consuming about 28 watts
between the CPU and the GPU, and B, it is crushing doom eternal,
despite being a little tiny handheld device.
Oh, had a little bit of lag there, but what are we set to? Because I think that this is set
to a very unreasonable level of detail right now.
This looks absolutely spectacular.
Yeah, it's set to ultra nightmare quality. That's not fair.
Let's go to medium, especially at 1080p resolution
on these mobile chipsets. Anything above that is a lot to ask,
even for an older AAA game like doom eternal. You can see right now though, I'm getting like 50, 55 FPS.
This is very playable.
I will say though,
coming from a device like the Ally, which is what I'm daily driving right now,
the screen is a little small. And it's not just, you know, oh, I'm old
and I can't see very well. Like your hot elements are just kind of tiny, sharp though.
I mean, 1080p at this size, what is this? Like six inches? Okay, six inches.
That's a lot of pixel density. I mean, that's like having a 4K monitor
that was only 12 inches diagonally, literally. I turned the speakers off before to get some idea
of how loud the cooling system is. And I gotta say, given how long we've had doom eternal running,
this is pretty impressive, not to mention that the CPU and GPU are both
in the 60 degree range right now. That is extremely reasonable, honestly.
If I was the one designing the fan profile for this, I'd probably let them run a little bit hotter
and just have it be even quieter. But even this is not necessarily a problem.
Let's turn on the volume a little bit. Yeah, they're downward firing
and I've seen some pretty incredible magic done with downward firing speakers,
but it does not appear to be present at this time.
Okay, let's, let's lose doom eternal.
This is cool though. Ah, shortcut key.
I see.
I don't know. I don't know what I've done.
Hello, buddy. Hello? That's another thing A&Eo is proud of with this device
is they support gyroscopic aiming. So that's something that you can actually configure
in a wide variety of games with third-party tools.
I do need to figure out how to fix the resolution of this display real quick though.
Come here, yo. That was weird. Oh, the RGB on the joysticks.
We found the configuration to be a little rough. Eye of space.
I really, really liked it in the first couple of iterations
and it feels like there's a lot of things that have almost regressed at this point.
There we go. RGB lighting effect. RGB brief.
Personally, I'm not a huge fan of having RGB on these anyway just because I find it really distracting when I'm gaming.
I always turn it off. Whoa, no way the keyboard is backlit though.
Yup. Okay, that's pretty cool. That I care about because if I'm in the dark
trying to type, so I can find my joysticks, right? Like, but if I'm in the dark trying to type something
that's really useful to have. This is nice. Quick toggles.
Brightness. Ooh, you can change trigger sensitivity.
That's really nice. Wow, effect triggers. Yeah.
Adjust the gyro sensitivity. That's super cool as well.
It's just a matter of whether this will come up when you're in game or not.
That's the trouble that I've had lately. Wow.
You can totally just set up your own profile.
Ah, it's doing the thing. Wear the mouse and the controller
both trying to fight for control. This is not good.
Let's see Cyberpunk on this thing in mute fan mode.
It'll have to ramp up. I just want to see how quiet it can manage to stay.
Oh dang it, I don't have an FPS counter.
And I can tell you guys it's in the like 35, 40 range.
Oh God, the IF thing is in the way now. Oh God, oh God, it's controlling everything.
Oh God, oh God. All right, hey look, did I nail it or what though?
FPS 38. Why do I even need an FPS counter?
I don't know. We are running in Steam Deck Optimize mode
with FidelityFX Super Resolution, but we're running at 1080p, which the Steam Deck wouldn't be.
And we're still getting, I mean, 1% lows of 29, 33, 35.
This is not a very dense area right now. It was a little bit lower before.
Pretty darn impressive. And we found the performance was really solid
across the board. It makes sense given that this is a Z1 Extreme
with good cooling. Did I say good cooling? Because I think I kind of mean great cooling.
Now that I put it in silent mode, yeah, they're up at around 70 degrees
and the controller is a little bit too hot.
I'd say maybe don't operate in that mode unless you're extremely sensitive to noise.
But guys, you can barely hear it.
That's friggin' awesome. Even battery life is decent.
It's got a 46 watt hour battery, so that's squarely in between the original Steam Deck
and the newer Steam Deck OLED, which gave it, okay, under an hour in our stress test,
but that's true of realistically any of these gaming handhelds
and a very respectable over four hours
in our endurance test. So you'd expect depending on the profile you're running in,
depending on your screen brightness, you're gonna be getting anywhere
from probably a couple of hours of gaming to in excess of four hours or even five hours
if you're just playing some sprite-based,
kind of retro-style game and you keep your screen dim.
Nice, small dead zones on the joysticks though. That's always nice to see.
Yeah, really responsive. Of course, nothing we've talked about so far
really addresses the main selling point of this device
and that's the keyboard. So enough cyberpunk.
Let's play some Mavis Beacon. Mavis Beacon, online, let's go.
My battery just died. It did warn me.
Famous. It's gonna be $6.99 in the Indiegogo for the base spec.
That is with the Z1 Extreme equivalent though. And then as you go up in RAM and storage and all of that,
the price goes up quite a bit. Now it should be noted, all of our performance testing was at DDR5 at 6400,
but the finished device is expected to go a little bit higher with a new BIOS.
We just didn't have that available to us at the time of testing. So it might perform a little bit better as well.
Hello, buddy, can you? Oh, I guess this is the thing, right?
During testing, we encountered a couple of instances where the screen just powered off.
This thing's on, but the screen no worky.
Hopefully that's another thing that they could sort out in firmware. Like the lack of a touch screen,
Ioneo has let us know that these issues will be resolved in the full production units.
Oh, I guess I realized I didn't even really comment on this mechanism.
It's great as long as you don't try to use it one-sided.
That's not great. That's fine. That's fine.
That is not very fine.
Yeah, I don't think we're playing Mavis Beacon. I think we're defeated.
Just like you'll be defeated if you don't stay subscribed to ShortCircuit
so you always know what's going on.