AYANEO Pocket S Review with video – The new Android handheld king?

AYANEO is back with their latest Android handheld, the AYANEO Pocket S. In our AYANEO Pocket S review we will discuss all the usuals, including the most important part, the benchmarks. How does it perform against the current King, the AYN. Odin 2? Is the extra cost worth the performance difference? Let’s find out!

AYANEO Pocket S Review Video

Unboxing the AYANEO Pocket S

Nice packaging as always from AYANEO. Inside we first have the AYANEO Pocket S handheld itself, we will take a closer look at it in a moment.

Underneath is an envelope containing user guides for the Pocket S and the software in both English and Chinese.Inside the box is a USB Type-C cable for charging.

AYANEO Pocket S Overview

The AYANEO Pocket S measures around 8.42 x 3.3 x 0.55 in (21.39 x 8.5 x 1.4 cm) and weighs 350g. It is available in two colours, Obsidian Black and Ice Soul White along with a choice of display resolution.

The display is a 6” borderless IPS mirror touchscreen. You have a choice of 1920×1080 or 2560×1440, the model we are reviewing is the latter. You have all the usual controls including AYANEOs master controller and hall effect analogues. There are two additional buttons for the AYANEO Space overlay and Home screen.

On the left side is a covered micro sd card reader. And on the right is a switch which changes the performance modes.

Along the top of the AYANEO Pocket S we have shoulders and triggers and small macro buttons beside them which are configurable in the AYA Space software. There are volume buttons and a power button which has an integrated fingerprint scanner.

And on the bottom is a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port for charging and data.

AYANEO Pocket S Technical Specifications

We will next take a look at the differences in the technical specifications between the two models. And as part of or AYANEO Pocket S review we will test the battery life, highest fan noise and highest temperatures.

	AYANEO Pocket S 1080P Model	AYANEO Pocket S 1440P Model
Display	6″ borderless IPS mirror screen, 1920×1080	6″ borderless IPS mirror screen, 2560×1440
PPI	368 PPI	490 PPI
Brightness	400 nits	400 nits
Colour Gamut	120% sRGB, 100% sRGB coverage, 85% DCI-P3	120% sRGB, 100% sRGB coverage, 85% DCI-P3
CPU	Qualcomm Snapdragon G3x Gen 2	Qualcomm Snapdragon G3x Gen 2
GPU	Qualcomm Adreno A32	Qualcomm Adreno A32
RAM	12GB or 16GB LPDDR5x	12GB or 16GB LPDDR5x
Storage	128GB UFS 3.1, 512GB or 1TB UFS 4.0	128GB UFS 3.1, 512GB or 1TB UFS 4.0
Controller	Master Controller with Hall sensor joysticks and triggers, X-axis Linear Motor, Six-axis Gyroscope	Master Controller with Hall sensor joysticks and triggers, X-axis Linear Motor, Six-axis Gyroscope
I/O	USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C, SD 3.0 card slot	USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C, SD 3.0 card slot
Cooling System	Vapour chamber + Active Air Cooling System	Vapour chamber + Active Air Cooling System
Battery	6000mAh	6000mAh
Operating System	Android 13	Android 13
Software	AYA Space, AYA Home launcher	AYA Space, AYA Home launcher
Case Colours	Obsidian Black, Ice Soul White	Obsidian Black, Ice Soul White
Dimensions	8.3 x 3.3 x 0.5 in (21.3 x 8.5 x 1.4 cm)	8.3 x 3.3 x 0.5 in (21.3 x 8.5 x 1.4 cm)
Weight	350g	350g

Powering it all is a 6,000mAh rechargeable battery. In our battery life tests while running Antutu benchmark on a loop, we got 2 hours 16 mins. You will get around 6-8 hours on average usage.

In our highest fan noise and temperature tests, also while running Antutu, we got a highest fan noise of 65 dB and highest temperature of 49 °C.

AYANEO Pocket S OS Overview

Running on Android 13 means we have a fairly up to date OS. AYA has their own home screen launcher as well as AYA Space for various tweaks and settings. Since we reviewed their first Android handheld, the AYANeo Pocket Air, I couldn’t see much difference or improvements. The Home software is decent enough, with easy access to your apps and the ability to import your retro gaming setup into a game browser. But it will require some setting up.

The AYA Space software includes an overlay feature giving you quick access to commonly used shortcuts, settings etc. From here you can change the performance levels, fan speed, take screenshots etc. It all works fine and I have no real complaint. But what is worth noting is that there is still no screen mapping feature to map the controller to on screen touches. This was supposed to be coming a long time ago for the Pocket Air and we are still waiting. Even budget Android handhelds have this feature and I think it is quite a large one to be missing from a premium handheld. The Pocket S supports touchscren mapping now in its software, all is forgiven AYANEO!

System Benchmarks

As we have the AYANEO Pocket S 1440P display model we have also used some software to change the resolution to 1080P so we can roughly compare the performance with the AYN Odin 2 which has a 1080P resolution. Please keep in mind the actual 1080P resolution model may have different scores, we will update our review with actual scores when we can test that model.

Geekbench 5 and 6

Our first benchmark is with Geekbench 5 & 6; they test the single and multi-core performance of the processor.

On Geekbench 5 we got scores of 1427 & 4172 at 1440P, and a bit higher at 1080P with 1,535 & 4,739 respectively. Interestingly, the AYN Odin 2 still has a higher multi core score against both resolutions of the AYANEO Pocket S.

And on Geekbench 6  we again see the Pocket S narrowly take the lead in single core performance, and fall behind in multi core performance by a fair amount.

Antutu

Next we have Antutu which performs a range of tests from UI speed to gaming performance.

We got roughly the same scores at both 1080P and 1440P, both higher than the Odin 2. 

3DMark 

3DMark tests the performance of the CPU and GPU working together. 

In the Slingshot benchmark, the AYANEO Pocket S maxed out the score as expected. In the more demanding Wildlife Extreme benchmark, we get scores of 3937 at 1440P, and 4314 at 1080P, a nice jump in performance.

Benchmark Summary

For 1440P resolution, keeping in mind the Odin 2 is 1080P, we see fairly small differences in performance for the AYANEO Pocket S. 3% for Antutu, lower differences in Geekbench, and just 6% in Wildlife Extreme.

At 1080P, and do remember these are from adjusting the resolution, so may not be 100% accurate. In Geekbench 5 , we see a 3% difference in favour of the Pocket S for single core, and for multi-core we see a 6% difference in favour of the AYN Odin 2. 

And for Geekbench 6 we see a 3% higher difference for Pocket S single core performance. And 2% lower difference in multi-core compared to the Odin 2.

For Antutu we again see a small 3 % difference in performance in favour of the Pocket S.

And for 3DMarks Wildlife Extreme we see a much larger 15% difference in performance.

Overall the AYANEO Pocket S does come out on top in the 1080P comparisons. There are small margins in general usage, but on GPU heavy usage there is a larger gap in performance. 

Having the higher 1440P resolution does mean more pixels to push and games and upscaled emulators do look great on it.

Gaming performance

Here are some games we tried that have support for gamepads.You can also use the built in screen mapping to map on screen touches to the game controls.

Emulation Performance

We know from the AYN Odin 2 that these newer Snapdragon processors are great for emulation. We saw that the now sadly departed Yuzu was even able to run some games at great speeds. Before we check that emulator out, let’s have a quick look at some older consoles and work our way up to the newer ones.

RetroArch

Everything will work perfect on RetroArch. Though for more the modern systems, use their separate apps for best speeds.

Dolphin

We tried our usual test games and all worked perfect. You can run 3x internal rendering, 8x AA & AF

AetherSX2

You can crank it up to 2.5x internal rendering on OutRun with 2x AA. For other less demanding games you can increase the rendering higher.

PPSSPP

We are running GoW at 5x PSP and 16x AF, 2x xBRZ upscale. You could go higher rendering but not needed.

Citra

Those little lags we saw on the Odin 2 are mostly gone now. Games are very playable!

Vita3K

The compatible games work very well! There are some shader cache lags now and again. But you can use 2x internal rendering and usually get 60 FPS after.

Yuzu

Overall quite good performance on 3rd party and lower demanding games. The more demanding and 1st party games still not quite full speed.

Final Thoughts

There’s no denying that the AYANEO Pocket S visually looks amazing. It looks like a mobile  device with a single glass panel on the front, but it has built-in controls. If you rest your middle fingers on the bottom of the trigger button grips and small fingers used as support on the bottom, it’s fairly comfortable and a secure enough grip. The Odin 2 perhaps does not look as fancy, but I do prefer the additional grip at the  bottom which makes it more comfortable and secure. The Pocket S wins in design, but the Odin 2 just feels more comfortable to actually game on.

In terms of performance then the AYANEO Pocket S overall wins here. But we generally see small gaps in performance, unless it’s GPU demanding, and there can be up to 15% difference. Something to consider, do you actually need the extra performance when emulators like AetherSX2, Citra and Yuzu are discontinued?

And now the price, you are looking at around £/$30 extra for the Pocket S over the Odin 2 both with 16GB/512GB storage. But at the lowest models you can save as much as £/$ 80 which is a considerable saving. 

The main factors really come down to the design and price for me personally. The AYANEO Pocket S looks amazing, but it’s not as comfortable to play on as the AYN Odin 2. The performance is not so much a factor as there’s not a large gap and nothing will really benefit from it on the Pocket S.  Which one would you choose and why? Let us know in the comments.

You can learn more and buy the AYANEO Pocket S here. Use the discount code POCKETS5OFF on the Checkout for 5% off. The code is valid for one month of this review being posted and can not be used during store sales or promotions.

Thanks for reading our AYANEO Pocket S review, we hope you have found it useful. If you have any questions please feel free to ask in the comments.