Ayaneo's Flip 1S DS Handheld Is A PC Gaming Salute To Iconic Nintendo DS
It's not clear what "1S" means specifically, but the new machine is a huge upgrade over the Flip DS in virtually every way. The original machine's 120Hz FHD LCD primary display has been replaced with a 144Hz OLED that Ayaneo says supports up to 800 nits of peak brightness. Meanwhile, the second screen has been radically upgraded too—from a 3.5-inch 960×540 mini-screen on the original to a 4.5-inch 1620×1080 LCD with a 3:2 aspect ratio.
Inside, the guts of the system are radically upgraded as well. The previous-generation machine used Phoenix and Hawk point processors based on Zen 4 and RDNA 3; the Flip 1S DS upgrades to a Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 SoC, offering four Zen 5 CPU cores, eight Zen 5C dense cores, and a full 16 compute units of efficient RDNA 3.5 graphics. Naturally, there's also a powerful 50 TOPS Ryzen AI NPU on this SoC, if anyone should actually release any apps for that.
The recessed sticks are easier to use than you think.
The upgrades on the Flip 1S DS don't stop there. The new machine uses a vapor chamber to keep that thirsty AMD SoC cool, and the moving parts of the machine, like the entire top clamshell, are all CNC'd to give smooth, reliable motion. The joysticks use "Tunneling Magnetoresistance" or "TMR" sensors, which are an even more advanced type of stick than the much-vaunted Hall-effect sensors. TMR sticks are contactless, like Hall-effect, but they offer higher precision and more rapid sampling (up to 1KHz)—and they do it while drawing a fraction of the power of thirsty Hall-effect sticks.
Both Type-C ports on the Flip 1S DS are 40-Gbps USB4 ports.
Where the original Ayaneo Flip DS came with two USB Type-C ports, on the Flip 1S DS, both are fully-capable USB4 ports. That gives you the ability to hook up all kinds of docking stations and external equipment, letting you turn the Flip 1S DS into a mini-PC if you so desire. The only potential weak point on the entire machine is that its Wi-Fi adapter is "only" Wi-Fi 6E with Bluetooth 5.3, not the latest Wi-Fi 7. That's still plenty fast for anything short of massive file transfers over a LAN, though.
The big questions are "when can I buy this" and "for how much," and the answers we have for you are "not yet" and "don't ask." Ayaneo hasn't shared any pricing or availability information about the Flip 1S DS yet, only having just unveiled it. We'd expect to see it launched this summer or in the fall, and it's likely that the pricing is still up in the air due to tariff nonsense. With all these premium features, though, don't expect it to come in under $1500. The company's previous-generation Flip DS still goes for over $1100, and this system is quite a lot fancier.
