AYANEO shares Pocket DS pricing, and it’s not bad at all

Pair your Android phone with a nice Bluetooth controller — or better yet, a nice clamp-on set of controller grips like the Razer Kishi V3 series — and you have got one serious piece of mobile gaming kit on your hands. But for as powerful as today’s phones are, when we’re trying to recreate a very specific gaming experience, sometimes we require some more custom-tailored hardware — say, for instance, wanting to emulate one of Nintendo’s dual-screen DS systems. Today we’ve got some new details on what’s looking like one of the best attempts we’ve seen in a long time to bring gamers just that.

When it comes to emulating dual-screen games on Android, we’ve already got options. You could just keep your phone in portrait and stack the screens, one above the other. Or if you’ve got a book-style foldable, you’re already close to rocking the correct form factor. But neither of those is really going to nail the OG experience, with discrete screens and robust hardware input. That’s exactly why we’ve been so excited to hear about AYANEO and its new Pocket DS.

The company’s no stranger to this hardware style, recently going this same dual-screen route with the Flip 1S. But while that was an expensive, Windows-based option, selling for nearly $800 and up, we were hoping to see a more affordable alterative with the Pocket DS’s Android-based solution. Today AYANEO launches its crowdfunding effort for the Pocket DS on Indiegogo, and early-bird supporters can get an order in for as low as $400.

The Pocket DS is built around the Snapdragon G3x Gen 2 gaming platform — the company has used that chip for its portables before, and it’s worked really well. Your main screen is a seven-inch 1080P OLED with a 165Hz refresh rate, and down below sits a five-inch 1024 x 768 LCD in a retro-friendly 4:3 ratio. Pair that with dual thumbsticks, a D-pad, and a full assortment of face buttons and shoulder triggers, and you’re well on your way to nailing what gamers expect from a dual-screen console.

In order to tap into all that hardware, the manufacturer has its AYASpace and AYAHome software packages, letting you remap buttons and manage game front-ends. There’s an 8,000mAh battery to keep your gaming going for hours, and a “PC-level” fan to make sure the silicon keeps cool even during those extended sessions.

AYANEO is producing the handheld in Shadow Black, Starry Yellow, and Retro Gray colorways, in configurations ranging from 8GB RAM and 128GB storage up to 16GB memory and 1TB flash. Like we mentioned, pricing starts at around $400 for this crowd-funding phase, and goes up to about $640 for the highest-end setup — still more affordable than the Flip 1S.

Shipments should start going out sometime in October, and these early-bird pricing slots are filling up fast, so don’t wait too long if you want to be among that first wave.