Just a few days ago, Ayaneo, a company that sells handheld and pocket PCs, announced its first SteamOS handheld, the Next Lite. Two aspects of this announcement stood out: first, it is priced for the popular price range, and second, it is the first non-Steam Deck handheld to run Valve's open source OS instead of Windows. Ayaneo was happy to provide us with more information.

While we already knew some aspects of this handheld device, such as the 7" 800p IPS screen and the 47Wh battery, we now know what powers this handheld device. There are two AMD APUs on board to choose from: Ryzen 5 4500U and Ryzen 7 4800U.

These chips are four years old, based on when they were first released: the 4500U has 6 cores and 6 threads, a boost clock of up to 4.0 GHz, and is based on AMD's Zen 2 architecture; the graphics side of the APU is handled by a Vega-based with 384 shaders GPU with 384 shaders. Clock speed is 1,500 MHz, but even at the low setting of 800p it is not suitable for the latest games.

The other option, the Ryzen 7 4800U, has 8 cores and 16 threads and a boost clock speed of 4.2 GHz; with 512 shaders and running at up to 1,750 MHz, it is by far the best choice if you want the best gaming experience.

Fortunately, there is still much to like about Nextlight. First, how about the Hall effect thumbstick and shoulder trigger? Because they don't scrape off contact marks, they are much more resistant to joystick drift than conventional ones, so much so that the others are likely to wear out before you start experiencing drift.

Then there is the fact that Ayaneo uses Valve's SteamOS instead of Windows as its operating system. This is a third-party project called HoloISO, which makes the Steam Deck OS generic enough to be installed on other devices.

While it won't be as official a Steam OS as the Steam Deck, Ayaneo has tailored HoloISO specifically for Next Lite, so hopefully it should work perfectly right out of the box.

The Next Lite looks very nice and would be a great little device for the right person. But I say "could" because it doesn't cost as much as you might think. For example, the first 100 customers will get the Ryzen 5 4500U version with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of PCIe 3.0 NVMe storage for $299.

This is roughly $500 less than the Asus ROG Ally with Ryzen Z1 Extreme, but that price will not be the norm, and frankly, the 4500U is not worth considering; the 4800U is the only product I would target, but it will sell for around $450. I suspect it will be priced around $450.

Ayaneo's marketing tagline for Next Lite is "a cost-effective choice that touches the future," but if the future includes four-year-old components and a Github project to lower the price, I'll stick with the past. [If Nextlight is successful enough, Ayaneo will bring a more powerful model to market. Even better would be to work directly with Valve to get the right version of SteamOS on their devices.

If we get our hands on Next Lite, we'd love to tell you what it's really like.