In 2023, we marveled at the enormity of Lenovo’s Legion Go, a 1.88-pound, 11.8-inch-wide Windows gaming handheld. However, in 2026, Ayaneo unveiled details of its NeXT II handheld, which puts Lenovo’s big boy to shame, as well as offering higher specs and a higher price than most other Windows gaming handhelds.
Let’s focus on bulk first. The Ayaneo Next II weighs a really wrist-straining 3.14 pounds, making it more than twice as heavy in the hands as the Steam Deck OLED (not to mention 2022’s original Ayaneo Next, which weighed a much more reasonable 1.58 pounds). According to Ayaneo’s spec sheet, the completed unit measures 13.45 inches wide and 10.3 inches tall, giving it about a 60 percent larger footprint than the Switch 2 (Joy-Cons attached).
However, the Ayaneo packs some seriously powerful portable PC performance into that bulk. The high-end version of the system sports the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 chipset with 16 Zen5 cores as well as the Radeon 8060S with 40 RDNA3.5 compute units. This should give it massive portable performance on par with desktops with an RTX 4060 or gaming laptops like last year’s high-end ROG Flow Z13.
The Next II has a huge screen and some adult-sized controls.
The Next II has a huge screen and some adult-sized controls.
Credit: Ayaneo
Ayaneo isn’t the first hardware manufacturer to package the Max+ 395 chipset into a Windows gaming handheld; The OneXPlayer OneXfly Apex and GPD Win5 have essentially the same chipset, the latter with an external battery pack. But the Next II clearly outshines the (smaller and lighter) competition with a high-end 9.06-inch OLED screen, capable of 2400×1504 resolution, up to 165Hz refresh rate, and 1,155 nits of brightness.
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