AYANEO Slide is now available on Indiegogo, starting at $699

The AYANEO Slide is now officially available on Indiegogo for a starting price of $699.

AYANEO's latest handheld, the AYANEO Slide, is now officially available on Indiegogo. For an early bird price of $699, you will get the handheld in a configuration of 16 GB of memory and 512 GB of internal storage. Prices for Early Bird go up to $1299, but this will net you 64 GB of internal memory and a whopping 4 TB SSD.

I believe $699 is a great price, knowing that the ASUS ROG Ally also costs this much for the same specs but comes with the Z1 Extreme, which is less powerful than the AMD 7480U used in the Slide.

The full specifications for the Slide are as follows:

6" 1080p Floating IPS-Screen
AMD Ryzen™ 7 7840U
Customized heat dissipation solution with three copper tubes
46.2Wh battery with PD fast charging
Hidden ergonomic keyboard
X-axis linear motor & 6-axis gyroscope
Hyper Sound stereo dual speakers
Wifi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2
Two USB-C ports
Fingerprint Sensor
Hall sensing joystick & Hall trigger
AYASpace 2
Available in White and Black

Personally, I am very intrigued by the AYANEO Slide. AYANEO and other smaller handheld manufacturers need to find alternative ways to compete against the likes of Valve, Asus, and Lenovo.

And going with experiments like the Slide or the Flip is a sure way to carve a niche in the handheld market by targeting people looking for something different to the typical chocolate bar-style handhelds we'll see from the more prominent brands.

It also helps that the Slide is more than reasonably priced (I am astonished AYANEO was able to target $699), and thanks to the keyboard, the Slide might fix one of the biggest gripes that I have with these handhelds: the onscreen keyboards are not that good (not even the one in SteamOS).

So, the chances that the Slide might replace the 2S as my favourite handheld are very high. Also, can we talk about how gorgeous this packaging looks?

The device was first teased at the beginning of the year, and then more details showed up a few months later (including colour options). It will ship later in December of this year.

We recently interviewed AYANEO CEO Arthur Zhang about how AYANEO got started, how they approach making handhelds, plus what they make of the competition.