thanks to art list for sponsoring a portion of this video learn more about
them later in the video i love handheld gaming but there are so many options to
choose from all with their own pros and cons switch OLED love the display
hate the pricey walled garden of games steam deck
outstanding performance and the price
but you better have an ltd backpack to carry it around in ltteststore.com but
what's this the same AMD ryzen 5000 chip
from the ineo next with a 1080p OLED screen
and it's small enough to fit in my
admittedly large pockets
i was absolutely ecstatic when i first
saw the io neo air it reads like a portable gaming enthusiast's wish list
hall effect joysticks dual usb type c
ports up to two terabytes of internal storage with microsd expansion and they
claim it doesn't even get that loud the whole package sounds too good to be true
io neo has been crushing pretty much everything but their naming scheme over
the last year with products like the next the pro and the next pro
but when valve swaggered into the handheld gaming pc scene and slapped
their giant deck on the table
everything else suddenly looked downright overpriced by comparison but
this little guy right here only
630 us dollars and inside you'll find 16
gigs of ddr4 RAM at 4266 mega transfers per second a 512 gig NVMe SSD and a
ryzen 5 5560u processor with vega 6
graphics it even gets down to 4.99 if
you opt for the 128 gig drive and less memory but what's really surprising is
the price of the full fat pro version
two terabytes of storage 32 gigs of RAM
and a ryzen 7 58 25 u go ahead i'll give
you a second to guess the price ready
only fourteen hundred dollars okay yes that's a lot of money but
it's a hundred dollars cheaper than its bulkier sibling the iano next while
being significantly better in a number of key ways
there are so many upgrades it's hard to know where to start but the most
visually obvious one is the screen
they've gone amoled and unlike the steam deck which manages roughly 60 coverage
of the srgb color space the ineo air can do 99
of dci p3 which is more than 100 of srgb
it's also shockingly color accurate with an average delta e of just six to be
clear that's not on par with a calibrated professional display but for
consumer hardware it's very impressive for context we previously measured the
steam deck at around an average delta e of 15
and the best part every pixel is self-illuminating which means perfect
blacks and it hits a whopping max brightness of 360 nits that's similar to
the switch OLED now i still prefer the steam deck late at night thanks to the
outstanding work that valve has done on its dimming capabilities but under
regular lighting conditions it looks downright basic in comparison
which raises a question for me why aren't
there more oleds in the handheld space well according to ionio they'd love to
but the problem is that nobody's making them in the right size and resolution
and getting a new screen mold can cost millions of dollars luckily for them and
for us they were able to source this existing five and a half inch 1080p
design and it looks great the only downside to it seems to be the huge
bezels around the edge and i would love to see the next version expand the
screen to utilize that empty space in terms of physical form factor there are
two versions the air and the air pro both look identical from the front and
feel very light in my small boy hands but if we turn them this way you can see
that the non pro is thinner just 18 millimeters at its thinnest point and
it's also about 50 grams lighter both of them make the steam deck and the
previous ioneo next look comically large
and in my opinion the io air marks the
point where this category goes from small pcs that you can hold to a
handheld console that runs Windows or Linux as it were
and impressively they've done this without giving up any i o
both of the usbc ports can be used for charging and connecting peripherals
including through a dock and we also get a headset jack a fingerprint sensor on
the power button and this convenient micro sd card slot for extra storage
now you can upgrade the included internal m.2 SSD and unlike the steam
deck it uses a more standard 2280 form factor but it's a bit of a pain to get
to compared to ineos previous consoles you've probably already noticed by the
way the RGB around the thumbsticks which can indicate whether it's charging or
low on battery i think that's super cool and the quality of the shell plastics
feels really good overall it's got a nice fingerprint resistant texture it's
quite sturdy and while there are some minor tooling mismatches like on the
bottom three and a half millimeter jack i only noticed this because we've gone
through the process of creating our own molds for our screwdriver recently which
by the way will probably be available for order on lttstore.com by the time we
release this video i am so excited for you to get your hands on one one bit of
feedback on the shell is that while the triggers feel nice and they also use
high durability hall effect sensors just like the joysticks even with my small
hands i had trouble reaching them comfortably in certain games for example
in roller drum you often need to alternate between moving the camera and
pressing face buttons while shooting this results in a sort of
pincer-like grip that can get a little tiring over time
the top bumpers and these two programmable inner buttons on the edge
can also be a little awkward to reach and only exacerbate that pincer problem
thankfully though you shouldn't need to press those ones very frequently with
all that said you're going to hear very similar feedback about pretty much any
other handheld console they're small which means ergonomic compromises and
for most retro titles that don't utilize thumb sticks or triggers especially at
the same time it feels great side scrollers like hollow knight or dead
cells run amazing at 1080p and rpgs like
octopath traveler look stunning on the OLED display
since it's a Windows device getting emulators up and running is pretty easy
but i would recommend hooking up a keyboard and a mouse through the usbc
hub at least while you get everything configured it's a real time saver and
you will probably spend some time configuring emulators because i think
that's what a lot of people are going to use this for and telling you about our
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thanks again to artlist for sponsoring that portion of the video or maybe
you'll stick to double a or indie games the reality is while the ryzen 5560u and
5825u are both solid cpus their vega
graphics is holding them back in a big way compared to the steam deck and to
the gpd win max 2 both of which are powered by rd and a2
gpus to be clear depending on your
expectations you may be perfectly happy running even modern aaa games but if
you're expecting anything better than 30 FPS 720p low settings you're setting
yourself up for disappointment even the maximum 18 watt pro mode wasn't enough
to put our air pro which has the top spec chip in the same performance class
as the steam deck i mean it's still respectable we managed to punch above 30
FPS in some aaa games at 720p low and
while we didn't benchmark every indie game they were all clearly running it
well over 60 FPS full 1080p hollow knight dead cells and roller drum didn't
so much as hiccup during prolonged gameplay even when turned down to 8 or
12 watts but there's actually some more bad news
if you're all about performance per dollar the steam deck is still going to look
more compelling it comes out ahead at basically every power setting which
affects more than just FPS charts
consider battery life we set both of these devices down to 5 watts and left
control running at 720p at the start of the game
not only did our io air pro shut down first but it could barely even display
the game at this wattage hovering around the 10 FPS mark our steam deck with the
same settings lasted about 30 minutes longer and the game was also in a much
more playable state that means that if you're willing to accept the errors
performance level you'd actually get more time away from the wall with
valve's handheld however if you want a 1080p OLED indie crushing machine that
is lighter and way more compact it's kind of a no-brainer and i'm going
to pick the ineo air or the air pro every single time i don't need a 400 ppi
display with incredible contrast and decent color accuracy but i want it and
it really does put the steam dex display to shame maybe valve can cook up their
own OLED version of the deck but hopefully by that time we'll see an io
neo model with AMD 6000 series processors like we saw in the gpd win
max 2. i would absolutely love that in
this form factor but and this is especially true if
you're buying this generation be warned there are some quirks
sometimes our cursor didn't display on the desktop or the taskbar when using a
mouse and changing the resolution with aya space led to some pretty awful
results that might take a little bit of wrestling to get it back into a usable
state some games and emulators did have minor issues that could have been caused
by the portrait rotated to landscape display though it should be noted that
most handhelds will run into the same issues and i think it's fair to say that
ispace will really need to improve over the next year or so to be clear they're
making great progress but i ran into several ux issues while simply trying to
launch games or change settings particularly when using the physical
buttons to navigate rather than the touch screen also remember i mentioned that changing
the SSD on this bad boy isn't as much of a cakewalk as the next
well it's beautiful and there are almost no
visible screws but as you can see from our tear down footage that means there's
a much higher chance of cosmetic damage when you open it up and you'll need to
do a bit more than just open the shell to make the upgrade want to upgrade your
LTT experience by the way that's super easy just subscribe to Floatplane.com
for behind the scenes and exclusive content this thing is truly impressive
but it also raises a couple of questions like how is it so cheap and what could
possibly be next the answer to the first one as it turns out is that there's just
not a lot of profit margin this time around no really with this evolution of the
product line it was apparently more a matter of solving the existing ioneo
problems of being too heavy and too thick rather than trying to turn this
into a hugely profitable product as for what's next our dna ii graphics is on
the horizon and with it the ineo2 which should hopefully incorporate some of the
design we've seen here today which is a kind of inconvenient fact that makes it
hard for me to truly fall in love with the ai neo air because the thing is
after trying out the 6800u and the windmax 2 i just can't stop thinking
about that chip in this machine with
this delicious OLED display we're going to have all the handhelds that we talked
about today linked in the video description by the way so you can get one for yourself if you want but if it
was my money i'd be waiting for next gen are you guys stoked about the handheld
pc gaming boom that's going on right now leave a comment below and if you liked
this video make sure to check out our video on the win max 2. it is definitely
the way to go if you gain somewhat but
you also want the versatility to use your gaming machine as a full-fledged
laptop computer