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AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro Review – Great things come in (relatively) small Android gaming handhelds

AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro Review
AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro Review
AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro Review
  • Design
    (5)
  • Build Quality
    (5)
  • Display
    (4.5)
  • Performance
    (5)
  • Features
    (4.5)
  • Software
    (4.5)

Summary

The AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro delivers high performance in a compact, handheld design, featuring cutting-edge specs like the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 CPU and Adreno 740 GPU for top-tier Android gaming and emulation on the go

Overall
4.8
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User Review
0 (0 votes)

Pros

  • High-Performance Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 CPU
  • Excellent for native Android gaming and emulation
  • Compact and Ergonomic Design
  • Decent battery life
  • Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.3

Cons

We got our hands on the eagerly anticipated mini model of the popular AYN Odin 2 Android gaming handheld. In our AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro review, lets see how it performs and compares with its larger sibling in our overview. In case you missed it, read our in-depth AYN Odin 2 Pro review here.

AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro Overview

We will start our AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro review with an overview and comparison. The AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro measures around 7.7 x 3.3 x 0.76 inches (19.8 x 8.5 x 1.95 cm) and weighs 320g (0.70 lbs)

It is smaller in width and height but slightly thicker main body than the AYN Odin 2 Pro with its larger grips. There’s around a 100g difference in weight.

The display is a 5” touchscreen with 1080P resolution, compared to 6” 1080P on the original model.

AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro compared with Sony Vita
AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro compared with Sony Vita

Visually, the Android Gaming Console, looks very similar to the Sony Vita with the curved sides, though the D-Pad and analogues are reversed in position. I have to say the AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro feels great in your hands, it is very comfortable to hold, and all of the buttons are within easy reach and feel responsive.

AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro Review - Top View
AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro Review – Top View

Along the top there’s shoulder and trigger buttons, a covered micro SD card slot, a Micro HDMI port for output to a TV or monitor, followed by volume and power buttons. The bottom has a 3.5mm headphone jack and USB type C port for charging and data.

AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro Technical Specifications

Next in our AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro review we take a closer look at the specifications and run some of tests for the battery life, fan noise and temperatures.

CPUQualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, 8 cores / 8 threads, (1x Kyro GoldPlus) 3.2Ghz, (4x Kyro Gold) 2.8Ghz, (3x Kyro Silver) 2.0Ghz
GPUQualcomm Adreno 740
DISPLAY5″ Mini LED 1920×1080 16:9, 440 PPI, 1100 nits, 60Hz
RAM8GB, 12GB LPDDR5X
STORAGE 128GB, 256GB UFS 4.0
I/O1x 3.5mm Headphone & Microphone Combo Jack, Speaker: Dual Speakers,
1x USB 3.1 Type C
, 1x Micro HDMI
COMMUNICATIONSWi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.3
BATTERY5000 mAh Li-po

In our tests running Antutu on a loop, the battery lasted around 2 hours 45 minutes which is quite impressive. This is at full load, so on average you can expect around 6 to 8 hours. We got 66 db fan noise on the highest fan speed setting, on average you can expect around 60 dB. And we measured around 49 °C highest temperature.

Android OS Overview

We continue the AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro review with a brief look at the operating system and included software.

AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro Review - Android OS
AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro Review – Android OS

The AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro’s OS experience is much the same as the Odin 2. It runs Android 13 and has a short welcome setup to get you up and running. It comes with the usual Google apps installed only, so you will need to install and setup any games and emulators yourself.

AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro Review - AYN Overlay
AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro Review – AYN Overlay

The AYN overlay still works great and lets you access commonly used functions for changing brightness, taking screenshots and other settings.

AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro System Benchmarks

As part of our AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro review we have conducted some system benchmarks. We can use the results for their performance as well as compare them with the Odin 2 and other similar Android Gaming Devices.

Geekbench 5

On Geekbench 5 we get very similar scores between the two Odin 2 models, well within the margin of error.

Geekbench 6

And on the newer Geekbench 6, we again see a similar score between the two models.

Antutu

Moving on to Antutu, we see around 4% difference between the two Odin 2 models.

3DMark

And on 3DMark benchmarks we see almost identical scores on the Wildlife Extreme benchmark.

Overall on paper, the Odin 2 slightly performs faster, however you would likely be hard pressed to see any actual difference in games.

Android Gaming

As the AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro is a gaming Android handheld we can of course enjoy some native Android games and test a few for this AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro review.

There are a decent amount of controller compatible games or failing that you can use the built in screen mapping software to use the controls. We had no issues setting up non-controller supported games. We are admittedly not massive native android game players, but everything we tried worked great.

Emulation Performance

And we could not make this AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro review without some emulator testing. The Odin 2 was a beast for emulation, supporting up to the now sadly departed Yuzu emulator. You can expect the same levels of performance with the AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro, running just about everything up to the PSP era with increased rendering resolutions and graphics tweaks.

Gran Turismo upscaled to 1080P on DuckStation
Gran Turismo upscaled to 1080P on DuckStation

For PlayStation 2 we saw great performance, depending on the game you can increase the rendering resolution to 3X. With Citra we generally kept games initially at 1 or 2x resolution, depending on the game you can go as high as 4x.

OutRun 2006 on AetherSX2 looks great upscaled!
OutRun 2006 on AetherSX2 looks great upscaled!

And for Vita, we saw generally good performance at 1 or 2x resolutions, it mainly depends on compatibility of the emulator and game as this is a work in progress emulator. And last but not least Yuzu. Like the Odin 2, it can run low demanding or 3rd party games quite well.

Don't expect all games to run on YuZu but there are playable ones
Don’t expect all games to run on YuZu but there are playable ones

In summary, just about every emulator works great up to the the very latest handheld, but don’t buy it expecting to play the latest games on Yuzu.

Final Thoughts

Time to sum up our thoughts for this AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro review. Late last year, we rightly named the original Odin 2, the King of Android Handhelds, and the AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro model can sit side by side sharing that title. Both models perform pretty much the same, so your choice will be if you desire a large or smaller handheld.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 on the AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 on the AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro

The AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro Android gaming handheld is small and sleek with a decent sized screen for the overall size. Whereas, the Odin 2 has a larger size with more comfortable hand grips and a larger display. For me personally, the AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro is my favourite out of the two, but you definitely wouldn’t be disappointed with either!

Street Fighter X Tekken on Vita3K emulator
Street Fighter X Tekken on Vita3K emulator

You can learn more and buy both the AYN Odin 2 Pro and AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro at their respective URLs.

Thanks for reading our AYN Odin 2 Mini Pro review. If you do have any questions, please feel free to ask in our comments.

Bringer of videos, text and images! AKA the social media guy at DroiX. Massive retro gaming fan and collector, with a far too large collection of consoles and computers from 1970's to modern.