Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “I need to test a theory… – AYANEO Flip DS”.
Oh excuse me, sorry was trying to test a theory and I guess I was right. It seems like every time I sneeze somebody releases a new one of these handheld PCS. It’S at the point now, where pretty much, no matter what form factor or spec you’re interested in there is something for you meet the iono flip DS, a uh, Brazen attempt at creating a machine that looks like it will be absolutely perfect for Nintendo DS emulation, but In truth, it’s a little bit more complicated than that. Let’S have a look at the machine.
It’S thick. The top looks really slick, though oh. This is something it’s available in two colors black and wouldn’t recommend uh. This has only been used for a couple of hours by our Labs team for testing, and you can already see it’s starting to look pretty dirty. Those are replaceable.
These are replaceable, hey there we go huh. Well, let’s see what else is in the package. Wow. Damn boy 65 Watts detachable USBC, cable love to see it.
Oh different, textured grip pieces, they’re, worse USBC, cable, looks like a 6ft cable and I was wrong. It’S a 5ft cable. What a bizarre C cable length, Okay, International adapters and USBC to a adapters for one and two – oh, I guess now’s a good time to look at the io of this thing on the top. You’Ve got your right triggers.
These are hall effect triggers you’ve got your shoulder buttons. You’Ve got a third button, really love to see that programmable you’ve got a Micro, SD slot just a little something like that. Then we’ve got two USBC ports. One is USB 3 one is USB 4.
So there’s the possibility that you could run Thunderbolt compatible with peripherals like external GPU Docks, but it’s not a guarantee on AMD platforms and it can be a little bit flaky and of course, you probably wouldn’t want to anyway, because that’s right, my friends, we’ve got an Oculink connector now, unlike Thunderbolt or USB 4, it’s not hot pluggable, so you can’t just plug in your GPU whenever you feel like. But if you shut down your system plug in an oculink egpu, then boot up your system. You don’t have to deal with some of the additional protocol overhead of these interfaces and you get a full pcie, gen 4×4 connection, meaning even reasonably performant. Modern gpus should run really freaking.
Well in this thing, what else we got here? We’Ve got stereo speakers on the bottom like to see the bottom mounted headphone jack, appreciate that, although I wouldn’t mind it, if one of these USBC ports was on the bottom at the back wow, that’s a lot of ventilation intake exhaust, and that makes sense because inside We’Ve got the same. Well I shouldn’t say the same. I was going to say the same processor that’s been taking the handheld Market by storm the Z1 extreme. I mean 7840. U i mean 8840. U that’s right, my friends, it’s not the same because it has more neural processing, it’s actually kind of funny.
If you load up the pages for the 7840, U and the 8840, u in two tabs and then flip between them, one of them’s, Global and one of them’s, Global and China and Japan in between those processor releases. China and Japan, joined the globe yeah. These are very similar processors and I’m making such a big deal about it, because technically this unit is available with either the 7,000 series or 8,000 series, both of which have the same eight zen4 cores the clock up to 5.1 GHz, just like the Z1 extreme and They’Ve got the same: Radeon 78m graphics like the Z1 extreme. The only difference is whether you get the last gen neural processor or the 8000 series slightly before neural processor, what you’ll be doing on it on a device like this. I have no idea, but that’s something for you to figure out, not me wow.
This is a big screen. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s just like the muscle memory of it, but the last time I used a dual screen device. It was a Nintendo DS, so I was just a little surprised to see such a actually large and vibrant screen. Iono seems to have absolutely no idea what the specs of this thing are.
They advertise everything from 400 nits. I think it is to 550 nits, but when we measured it in our lab, we got over 800 nits, which is extremely bright for an SDR display. Making this thing easily usable, even Outdoors, which is pretty cool grayscale performance, was okay at 2.4 was a little on the warm side good for HD video, but it’ll be a little darker than normal for reference or desktop content, and it managed 97 % coverage of the Srgb color space, which is fine, color accuracy, was also fine and the same can pretty much be said of the bottom display, except that it had a little bit better gamut coverage and doesn’t get as bright. Let’S talk about the inputs H, it’s quite flat, though.
I’M sure any resemblance to the Nintendo DS is quite coincidental, but, unlike the DS, instead of going with, you know those awful slidy joysticks in order to keep it flat. They’Ve got a pretty decent range of motion on these and they’ve just recessed them under the surface. I guess that’s a big part of the reason. This thing is so bloody thick because look how much of the space is being taken up by these joysticks? They feel.
Okay, though, I think it’s a pretty okay tradeoff actually ergonomics are generally pretty okay, especially considering this thing’s considerable heft. What else have we got going on here? We’Ve got a button for Io space. Okay, so we can adjust our power profile. We can adjust our performance overlay sure, let’s turn that on. Let’S go simple, though we can adjust our fan, configuration smart or Auto, Smart or Auto. Should I do a smart or an automatic segue to our sponsor xplit, whether you’re a streamer, a content, creator or you’re? Just always on video calls for work, xplit Cutting Edge broadcasting and video production tools can help.
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Let’S figure out what all the buttons do: uh uhhuh. Oh we’ve got Dr a mouse. Oh there we go so they’re just set up in a pretty St um.
How do I right click? Yeah? Well, that’s left click! Oh hey! There! It is nice. Let’S have a look at the display settings. Okay, that’s a sensible, config yeah! It’S definitely too bright.
Do you want me to turn it down? Glen? Okay, let’s lose some of this 800 nits of brightness. Here, oh there’s, one of those little CH. Oh, that is uh.
Not the best one of these little trackpads I’ve ever used all right. We got our oh cool, some programmable buttons select the window to move to the secondary screen. Okay sure we did come across some bugginess managing applications between the two screens, including a weird one, where, when we were doing our battery testing, we found that extinguishing.
The bottom screen didn’t really have a significant impact on battery life uh because it was still showing up to Windows and it was still outputting to it. It was just a full black screen at whatever brightness it was at as far as we could tell, but the good news is that it’s windows, so when it comes to window management across multiple screens, there are lots of different options both built into the operating system And from third parties, so you got your standard, Xbox C buttons right here. You’Ve got whatever this button. Oh okay, ah go to desktop button.
Let’S see what this button does. It is okay, but if we do that, oh I see so that overlay is an overlay. It sits in the foreground, okay, so this toggles that functionality that’s pretty cool. Oh one thing I haven’t mentioned power buttons here, built-in fingerprint scanner love to see it.
I am not a fan of these vibration Motors. Can I just get that out there right now? You can hear what I don’t like about them. I bet uh, let’s see if we can adjust that a little bit. Okay, vibration! High! Oh that’ll, probably oh guys, really the controller is working both in game and in I well high. Is that but more, let’s try low well, not great vibration Motors. I mean hey how about this performance, though all right are we actually getting over 100 FPS in PS of horizon 5 right now, overall gaming performance on this device was very solid, not as good as the Rog Ally.
Curiously, it seems like iano is prioritizing CPU clock speed compared to GPU clock speed, but pretty much in line with what you’d expect from a Z1 extreme 78, 40u or 8840? U, how are these speakers not very direct? Sometimes you can tell – and sometimes you can really tell, but these are down firing – AF they’re allowed, though very tiny, though of course, if what you’re after is the perfect machine to play Nintendo DS games, I bet you’re willing to overlook kind of mediocre speakers. Cuz like realistically, how good were the speakers on the DS? Now I should clarify all of my hours in Mario Kart DS were on a DS and that’s kind of for good reason. Ds emulation is good in terms of performance, but in terms of um configuring for the dual screen layout of the DS. It’S not that great um it turns out. This is kind of how you’re intended to do it with most of the emulators. There are hacky ways to get it to work a little bit better than this, but um. I saw a comment on a forum from a prominent member.
I don’t think they were a developer, but they were certainly a prominent member, saying yeah. If we had that option. You’D, try it for a little bit and then you’d be like ah forget it, it’s better to just have the screens right next to each other. I think I might kind of agree well here. Let’S, let’s give this a shot yeah, what’s the benefit of having all this white space other than nostalgia, laying it out like this, I’m not sure, there’s some other challenges with playing DS games on a machine like this. I guess one of the big ones is like: why would you do that? The battery life is going to be a fraction of what you’d get from an actual DS, which is running a glorified Smartwatch processor.
By today’s standards. We got anywhere from under an hour in our extreme stress test to about 5 hours in our endurance test, which is very respectable for something running a 45 hour battery with this kind of processor horsepower, but nothing compared to what you’d get on a DS. The other big issue is that if you really want to Pirate DS games um, the DS is thoroughly thoroughly hacked at this point not going to lie guys. If I really wanted to emulate the DS, I think I’d almost rather have a Game Boy, like form factor with a really tall screen. Then I just don’t have the unnecessary gap between my screens that doesn’t really yeah seem to contribute anything. We got a little hyper fixated on the Nintendo DS. We forgot about 3DS gameplay, but if you’re wondering it also plays fantastic and look, you can use both the screens handy for uh. Throwing nuts at your foes bam we’re playing at 3x resolution and everything is buttery. Smooth the other big elephant in the room is pricing. It starts at just under $ 1,000 and makes its way up into the $ 1,500 range. By the time you put the latest processor, the available 64 gigs of RAM and up to 2 TB of storage in it so cool.
Yes, the option that has a keyboard down here, also pretty cool. That’S a really neat form factor with the ability to you know, type, passwords and stuff like that, whenever it’s inconvenient to use an on-screen keyboard, speaking of which I thought I pressed something earlier. Oh yeah, there you go, this is rebound on screen keyboard by default. Okay, so that’s nice, really cool form factor very holdable, actually kind of like the ergonomics. I wish this was a little bit more rounded right here, like it’s a cool machine.
It’S a cool factor. It’S a very complete package. It’S got Wi-Fi 6E.
It’S got a 120 HZ display that yeah is pretty good. It’S just. It’S got a very challenging pricing structure right now, when you can get an Rog Ali Z1 extreme for like $ 700, which is over $ 250 less and that’s at full price. With those things going on promo, either open box or brand new fairly frequently, so if you’re super into the form factor, there’s a lot to love here I mean the Ali doesn’t have oculink, that’s pretty sick, but if you’re not that into the form factor.
Well, I wouldn’t blame you. It’S really pocketable, oh sort of as long as your pockets are thick subscribe to the short circuit. .