 This is a $400 Nintendo Switch. This is a $1,400 Nintendo Switch Pro. Well, kind of. And if you're having deja vu, it's because we have been here before when we talked about this $1,000 Nintendo Switch Pro. This is an Aeonio, and we talked about this once already. It's a console that was designed to be a Nintendo Switch Pro. They even said that in their own Kickstarter for the console. But that came and that went, and we talked about that when we talked about that. Then we heard about the Steam Deck, which is Steam's answer to the Nintendo Switch. And I think at that point, Aeonio said, hmm, well, now we have to do something else to compete with that too. So they decided to release a very comparable, Aeonio Next Advance. And that's what I have. I say comparable because it is. It's very similar, maybe a little bit more powerful than what the Steam Deck will be. It has its own fun gimmicks and features and a couple of surprises that was personalized just for me, apparently. But before I dive in to this thing too much, unboxing this was an experience. Okay, so I assume I've already intro'd this video, so I don't have to say hello again. Holy crap, this box is heavy. I guess it's about the same size as a Switch box. Then again, maybe not. Quite a bit bigger, honestly. And they sent me a dock, but apparently this dock is to work with this Aeonio, and they haven't sent the dock for this one yet. Please put on gloves to open. Wait, what kind of surgery process is this? I don't, there's go, I'm so glad I recorded this. All right, okay. This is a very expensive machine, so I guess, I gotta be honest, I'm probably gonna end up playing this on the toilet with my grubby poop fingers, so I'm not really too worried about it. Oh, this, oh, damn. I think this is where the $1,400 goes. I don't think it's on the console. I think it's on this, I have never seen a nicer box, but I am beside myself with this box. It's glass, that's why they want you to wear gloves. This is the fanciest console I have ever unboxed. All right, I got a terrible camera angle here, I apologize. Ooh, my Lord, this is fancy. No way, oh, they have gone all out to impress me this time. Oh my God, they saw that my last video got a million views, didn't they? It says my name. You have to be kidding, that's so nice. I don't know why I'm trying to show the camera like I'm not gonna get B-roll of it. Oh, my gosh. Okay, I gotta be honest, I haven't even seen a picture of this thing yet. Okay, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, okay, all right. This is very different to the last model. Oh, they personalized the console. Thank you, what the heck? All right, well I think from here it's mostly gonna be me, you know, setting up a Windows device and installing Steam and downloading games. Sometimes my job is really fun. Before we talk about anything else, a question you might have is what's the audio quality like on this thing? Different shirt and I shaved. Well, we can talk more about the speaker quality later in the video, but first I wanna say when you start running games like Sea of Thieves or even Red Dead 2, the inbuilt fan starts to kick up like a jet engine and sometimes it'll overpower the game volume. The good news is though, I don't really hear the fan at all. When I'm using my Raycons, I mean they're noise isolating. I have had my Raycons for years at this point and they are still coming in clutch every single day. Using Bluetooth, they can connect to anything like this A and Neo Next of course, since it's just a PC that has Bluetooth. But if you're not playing games on a $1,400 handheld console and instead you're using the much more reasonably priced don't worry, because Raycon works perfectly on this too for wireless sleek gaming on the go. Over the last few years, I've taken my Raycons to the gym, on walks, into the forest, even on a freaking go car. Probably not the safest idea. They're so versatile and perfect for all situations with their fantastic audio quality even at half the price of other premium audio brands. Not to mention they won't fall out of your ears even at 40 miles per hour. Thanks to the optimized gel tips for a perfect in ear fit. Also, they'll last much longer than an electric go cart with eight hours of playtime and a 32 hour battery life. No wonder that Raycon's everyday earbuds have over 48,000 five star reviews. As always, you'll be seeing a lot of Raycon throughout my channel this year as they've always supported me and the content that I create here. If you enjoy this video or any of the content that I create, please consider clicking the link in the description box or go on to buyraycon.com forward slash beat em ups to get 15% off your pair of Raycon's. Sorry, I loaded up Sea of Thieves for this ad read and I'm just always amazed at how great this game looks. Oh, okay. Now I said this last time and I'm gonna repeat it this time. This video is not sponsored. At least not by Aeonio. Thank you, Raycon. They did, however, send me this unit for free as a product review just like they did this one. But just because they sent me this, doesn't mean I'm gonna lie or say anything I don't believe just like I did in this video when I said that I liked it but it also kind of sucks. So to prove again that I'm not being told to say anything or hide anything, I'm gonna let you know something. This $1,000 console we reviewed already on this channel that I played for maybe eight hours after that video, it's broken. Yeah. No, no, it's not. No, it's not actually. Hi, this is me from like two days later. I'm really tired. This video is supposed to go up tomorrow and I made a mistake. Turns out it very specifically needs the Aeonio charger, which I lost. As I was editing this today, I grabbed the new charger and now it turns on, which is actually very helpful for the video but I'm leaving in the fact that I couldn't get it to turn on for dramatic effect. But also because when I shot this whole video, I had it in the back of my mind that the last one broke. So I went in with a relatively negative vibe thinking I couldn't really promote this thing and that maybe this one will break too, which definitely improves my end opinion on this. So I'm gonna leave the video as it is because everything I say from here is true. But this me is gonna come back at the end with my new final thoughts because my old final thoughts are irrelevant now. Okay, so we're gonna take a look at everything this can do because I still find the concept of this very exciting. It's things like this get me excited for what Nintendo could do next. One of the cool features this one has is this button at the top is not only the power button, but it's also a fingerprint scanner. So my console is locked to my fingerprint and that's a really nice little feature that I really appreciate. These two buttons on the bottom right here are so much nicer and more condensed than whatever the heck the billion buttons on this thing was. I like that this is just pretty straightforward, start select on the left, normal button controls and then just two buttons over here. So this big one brings up the Aeonio's own quick tool and if you hold it down, it brings up the Aeonio home, whatever. But I really liked this. The first one didn't have it. Whatever games you install, wherever you install them, Steam, Game Pass, whatever, they show up in here and you can always treat this as just like the home screen menu. I like that. Also, there's a few options in here you can have a look at. Like if you go to assistant, you can look at the hardware information which is why I wanted to come in here and show you guys, I'm just gonna leave it up on the screen. This is what it has. I'm not a big tech guy. I know that it's powerful. I think it's fairly comparable to the Steam Deck and honestly, even fairly comparable to the old Aeonio. Other than that, it doesn't. And then the button on the right, it'll like switch between tabs, usually just whatever you had open recently. But then if you hold it down, it brings up the task manager, which is nice. I've been having some issues with the keyboard again on this thing. You can press a button and bring up a keyboard which is great, works fine most of the time. But often in games, you can't bring up the keyboard while you're playing. In fact, when I was streaming, trying to record footage on Twitch, I was trying to play Genshin Impact and when I loaded the game up, it wanted me to log in with my email. But every time I tried to bring up the keyboard, the keyboard would overwrite the game and it would like minimize it. Usually when you press, it'll come up with a keyboard. If that doesn't happen, you can bring up this thing and bring up the keyboard. But for some reason, this game decides to minimize when the keyboard comes up. And there was literally no, there was no way for me to, to portably on this thing, type in my password. The only way I could solve it is to get my actual keyboard, get a step down converter to make it USB-C, plug it into this thing and literally use a keyboard to type in, which is an ideal for a portable console. Although I will say, I got that step down converter from the A&O box itself. Inside the bottom of the box is actually like this fancy box of chocolates S guide, kind of telling you what flavors you've got underneath. And once you open it up, you have the power cord, the charger, as well as a bunch of other converters. And then it has two of this USB-C converters. And then there's even this memorial nameplate base, which I never actually took out. Oh, okay. I mean, that's, all right. Let's talk about some of the games. I've done my best once again to record gameplay of this thing without having a doc. I still can't natively record anything off this thing. So I'm still using this $20 Amazon dongle. I mean this honestly, everything looks better than what you're gonna see. You can only get so much of a vibe from filming a screen and, you know, playing it. First, you know I had to. I loaded up Cyberpunk. Cyberpunk is notoriously terrible. Just really badly optimized in general, which is why it doesn't work great on anything, but especially the older consoles. And we did try that on the old A and the O. And yeah, it ran like garbage, like 15 frames and you just, it was unplayable. Little bit of an improvement. I would say it feels a bit more stable, but still very, very unplayable. And funny actually, I haven't played this game in over a year since my review. Proud still disappear in masses when you shoot bullets. Like I don't wanna get into a review about Cyberpunk, but I thought they would have fixed some of this by now. One game that really impressed me last time on this A and the O was Red Dead 2. And once again, it's impressive on this thing as well. I was playing through some solo single player as well as jumping online around 25 to 30 FPS. So we're still not, I wouldn't say we're still at, even on low settings, I feel comfortable saying this is a smooth Red Dead 2 experience. It's so close. Witcher 3 is a fun one because we have that on Switch. And while it runs smooth, it's still a very ugly game on the console. I mean, it just looks like an oil painting. So it's fun loading it up on this because on here it's fantastic. Really nice, consistent 30 FPS, gorgeous looking, crisp visuals, looked really nice, barely any compromisation here with this. Like I could play through Witcher 3 on this thing perfectly. And something that I think is worth noting too that's really cool with something like this, with Steam and Game Pass and a lot of these services, your saves are uploaded to a cloud automatically. I mean, I'm diving into my Doom playthrough which I started on my Xbox and I'm halfway through the game, but I can jump right straight into where I was on this thing, just cloud saves. The note, I didn't have to just sign into my account. That's it. GDA 5 is still a standout. I mean, that game is just very well optimised, but also we're going back to, you know, 360 now, but still you can run this game on high settings at a fairly consistent 60 FPS. I was actually getting no dips in this either whereas games like Call of Duty Warzone is awfully, awful optimised, awful game, awful game. On the first Aeonio, it was unplayable. Visually it looked terrible and the frame rates were low and inconsistent. But on this new Aeonio next, it was one of the biggest improvements I've seen out of all of these games I'm comparing. The visual fidelity is much higher and the frame rates are even going around 40 or 50, but there are dips in the frame rates, making it kind of hard to play. And maybe because I play a lot of shooters on PC, but I really struggled to have any fun playing this portably. Genshin Impact, I really wanted to test that this time. That's a game we have been dying to come to switch. So it's cool, the idea that we can get a portable console and just DIY it, you know, just do it ourselves. And I did, I struggled of course to log in, like I said. But once I had logged in, I was cruisin'. No issues, runs really nice. Even at 60 FPS on like medium graphics settings, I have to say, as far as like handheld portable off the screen gameplay, the camera's not doing it justice. It is so clean, vibrant and crisp. Let's talk about some emulation. Because this thing, I mean, I think when you get a console like this, I first thought a lot of people have is emulation, which makes a ton of sense. I mean, why not? But I had a hard time with emulation and it wasn't for lack of trying this time. I spent a whole day trying to get some of this stuff to work. I'll start with Project 64 because that is a well-optimized little program. Let me tell you, it's fantastic. Throw a game into it and off you go, you're playing. So with all these emulators, you have to configure the controls yourself. And with Project 64, that was fine. And I got playing games like Mario 64, Zelda Ocarina of Time and they look fantastic, so good. I mean, Zelda has the fog back that Nintendo Online stripped out of their weird emulation version. So technically it's even more true to the original version of the game. But when it came to Dolphin Emulator, which is for Wii games and GameCube games, I spent hours trying to configure the buttons for this thing and it just couldn't do it. I went into the button layout, everything registered from the D-pad, analog sticks, triggers, start, select, everything. Even the A button, but for some reason B, Y and X just shuts off in Dolphin, refuses to work. It's the weirdest thing. And despite my best efforts and hours of trying, I could not get X, Y and B to map. So, I mean, I got the games running, I can load up Smash as Captain Falcon, but I can only do Smash attacks. I can't do any specials. No Falcon Punch for this guy. So, I mean, buyer beware, if you're looking at emulating GameCube and Wii games, I don't think you can. You just never know what you're gonna run into. Some things will load up like Doom and be good to go right away. But then I have like Dolphin where like the buttons don't work, or I have Red Dead 2. Every single time I open that game, it opens in like a weird corner of the screen. I found a workaround for it. If I switch the screen up and make it rotate, then hit full screen, then make it rotate back to normal, it'll be full screen, but stretched out. So then if I set it to full screen one more time, it'll finally default to the right full screen resolution. A similar thing happens with Monster Hunter Rise. I thought that would be a fun game to download and because you know, it's a Switch game and so we'll compare it visually. And again, when I load it up, it loads up in a weird box and I have to try and find my way into the controls. But every time I load up one of these two games, I have to go through this. Hi, me again. I wasn't gonna mention this in the video. In fact, I didn't. But now that I have this working and I've got to use the dock it came with, something that I didn't think was a big issue has become a big issue. Because this is a PC, I can just plug in an Xbox controller and it's plug and play good to go. But half of the games refuse to even acknowledge it and I've tried updating drivers on the Aeonio, I've updated the controller, I've tried everything. All of Game Pass, ironically, will not recognize an Xbox controller, which is why all of those games I'm playing handheld. Steam seems to work fine with it, but Witcher, which is running off of Steam, will not recognize the controller. I wasn't gonna mention it because I figured who's gonna be using a controller anyway. It's a handheld device. But I realized actually the toy, if you're plugging it into a dock, you need to use a controller. Unless you wanna sit at the dock and use the console while staring up at the TV. I mean, if you wanna buy one and try and fix it, go for it, but I can't. Although speaking of Monster Hunter, when I finally got it working, it looks amazing. Although I don't know what the heck is happening on this screen. I mean, honestly, it looks very comparable to the Switch, but if you just put glasses on, I mean, I can see details I couldn't really see before. Just really cleans it up and runs at 60 FPS. I accidentally skipped ahead because I wanted to stay in emulation to talk about Breath of the Wild. Some of y'all are gonna hate me. In the last video, I tried to get Breath of the Wild on this. I don't know what I was doing. I was trying to rush it. I couldn't get it to work. It was very important to me that I got it to work this time and I did. I got it to emulate. Not only that, I threw some mods on this. Sorry, Nintendo, but what you gonna do at this point? I got some reshader mods. I changed Link to Linkl. If you don't know the story behind that, I have videos on my channel about modding Breath of the Wild, but don't tell Nintendo. And sure enough, it looks incredible and plays really nice. And there's more freedom to customize it there however you want, which also goes without saying, but the emulator I use for that is a Wii U emulator. So any Wii U games you wanna play, you can load them up on this bad boy and they all work great. It works with the inbuilt controls, work with my 360 controller. Yeah, Breath of the Wild was really cool. I tested a lot of games. I'm telling you, I really wanted to put this thing through some paces. So quickly I tested Halo and I was surprised to get about 25, 30 FPS. It was more 30 with some dips down to 25. It was consistent. It was all on low settings, but even still the game looks pretty nice. That's the thing with this screen too is even games all the way on low, when you slam it down to this screen, you can't really tell how bad it looks if that makes sense. You can't tell how low the resolution is when you only have a screen that's seven inches wide to tell. Halo was very playable. The only thing was extremely long load times. Like, starting the game takes several minutes. Long time. Although I wanna make clear that literally everything else I played loads surprisingly fast. It's just Halo for some reason. Sea of Thieves is a go-to for me when testing anything just because that game is gorgeous. And sure enough, yeah, it works really nice on this thing. Actually, I even turned the settings for Sea of Thieves up to ultra as high as they could go. And I was still getting a locked 30 FPS. If you can believe it, what you're seeing right now is recorded footage from my handheld, not like an Xbox One. Then I wanted to do a couple of games that were on Switch that on Switch run terribly. I figured that would be a fun experiment. So the first one was Apex. Apex in my opinion is not playable on Switch, but more than anything is hideous. And I really, really wanted to test it on this. I was blown away by the, again, fidelity, how great the game looked and the fact that it was running at a really, really like locked 30 FPS. Extremely playable, way more than Warzone and definitely more than Apex on Switch. And then of course, Outer Worlds, which is another game that looks like an oil painting and is fairly unplayable on Switch. But here, it looks amazing. I mean, for one, the sky is back where it's supposed to be, but everything looks nice visually. And I believe, again, that was 30 FPS, but very steady and yeah, fun. And with it being on Game Pass again, I can bounce between my Xbox and this thing whenever I want. So those are all the games I tested. And with the two terabyte internal storage, every one of those games is still installed on this, like all at the same time. And I think I have almost a terabyte, maybe a bit less left, but still, that's crazy. And if you're not into installing games that take up hard drive space, you could try streaming, maybe. So I thought it would be a fun experiment to try streaming Cyberpunk from my PC. So my beefy PC running it at 60 FPS, streaming it to this, I used Moonlight for that. And I have to say, that was surprising. I was streaming it at 60 FPS. The visual quality was really great, honestly. I mean, it looked very comparable to what I see on my PC screen. And the input delay was minimal. Yeah, I liked it. The thing is though, I didn't bother testing too much more of that because that's something Moonlight, even you can do on a phone. Like I could play Cyberpunk on my phone using my PC and probably get similar results. So I don't think it's really a selling point of a $1,400 console to say, well, you could just stream everything to it because yeah, you can do that with a $400 console. I'm back. Before we talk about my very final thoughts, I realized I didn't talk about where to buy this thing. And that's because I don't know. I don't know why I've been wearing my headset this whole time. I am very confused. So they said they were gonna officially release the Aeonio Next on the 5th of January and send out some prototypes to people in advance for a review. They did this part, but I can't find the Aeonio online anywhere. They also said they're preparing an indie and crowdfunding pre-order campaign for the Aeonio Next and the Next Pro. So is it getting crowdfunded? Is it out? I don't know. But my final thoughts on it, in case you wanna try and figure out how to buy one eventually, I do like it. I feel like it's overpriced though. Just comparing it to anything. It's $1,400, but comparing it to the Steam Deck, which is close in specs, granted I haven't had a chance to play with that yet, but that's like $1,000 cheaper. I don't see, I mean, you have to just be Mr. Moneybags to want this thing. That said, if you are Mr. Moneybags, I was very impressed with the improvements over the first one. Going back and watching all the footage while I was editing, I didn't even realize how much better Warzone was playing that I'm maxing Sea of Thieves on Ultra and still hitting 30 FPS. Everything was having better performance on this. So it is a sizable upgrade from this one. Biggest thing with this is it's a very, very quality feeling and nice looking console. It has fantastic triggers. I love that they've moved the sticks away from the Switch Joy-Con sticks and they have their own big Xbox PlayStation feeling sticks. The D-pad is nice, the buttons are great. Everything about this looks, feels, and plays quality. And as long as this thing never actually breaks, I think it's a really cool unit. If you're willing to persevere through issues you are going to have, whether it's trying to emulate games and finding out that buttons don't work or have the games you try and play don't allow a controller to be used or a lot of the games loading up and weird aspect ratios and you trying to figure out how to resize them. I gotta say after playing this thing for a few straight days and going back to Switch, I realized how much I've taken for granted games just loading up and working the first time you try and play them. If you're willing to go through all of that and you have the money, I don't see any reason why not to buy one. I personally wouldn't. I don't have $1,400 to drop on this. I'm very happy I got mine for free. Okay, thanks for watching this video. I really enjoy making these because for me it's a ton of fun seeing again what is possible for the future but also like how it is cool. It is cool. Like the video, comment down below with your thoughts and subscribe. I appreciate it.