TrimUI and Ayaneo Hardware Updates

Hello and welcome back to a new episode of NPC that stands for Nax Portable Console. It's the show about the games we take with us and the handlets we take with us and maybe sometimes we actually use those handls and some other times we don't. We'll talk about that later I am Federic Vitici and I'm joined by John Porce. Hello J,ohn. Hey, Federico, I see your home and I'm glad we're back and able to do an episode. We took a week off because our schedules were a little bananas between personal stuff and us at WW C, but here we are and we're going to catch up on the news and talk about a bunch of stuff. Brandon is taking another week off so we miss you Brandon. He'll be back with more with more thoughts about the hand el becauses that's what he does . But I mention the handels that we take with us up front, John , because so we just traveled a couple of weeks ago to WWC in California. It was a long flight for me and I told you I was going to bring both my Nintendo Switch two and my Legion go two. I ended up just taking the switch two and I never played . So I either got either worked or slept. That's what I did. Yeah , okay, so yes, I will say that yes, that was the same experience for me. Although I was a little better off because I brought the RG rotate and that's a lot smaller so I didn't have the big switch in my bag . And I showed it off to some friends and fiddled around with it a little bit, but you and I were extremely busy and I took a red eye back to the east coast and ended up sleeping almost the whole way home Yeah , yeah. I think it's really challenging for me when I'm traveling to WWE to mentally take time off. Yeah, your focus is on work and it's hard hard to to break free from that, I think. That is always the challenge with playing video games when you are an adult, right? I mean, taking your mind off, you know, family duties or work , especially when you're self employed , it can be challenging to carve out some time just for playing video games, which I am going to do this weekend because I think same . I want to play the Adventures Valley, which I played a little bit last night. Oh, you did. Yeah, I did. I just got started. It was just early early stuff. I played the demo months ago and I loved it so I can I'm torn between deciding do I want to play on the Legion Go Two or do I want to play on the switch? I think I'm going to go Legion Go two because I want to see those two HD two D graphics pop on the OLED . Yeah, that was like I think I'm going to go with Steam but yeah I think it's a it can be challenging , you know, especially when you don't work in the video game industry like as your primary job because we do other things for our main job. It can be hard to say, well, I'm just going to set aside three hours to play video games, especially when you're a family, when you're a grownup. I think a lot of our listeners can relate to that. But it's especially tricky for me when I'm going to WWC where it's like it's arguably the most important event of our calendar year at Max Stories because they announced all the software that we're going to be writing about for the next six months . So obviously coming back first of all I was exhausted and I needed to sleep because I didn't want to destroy my sleep schedule coming back to Italy. And then I just I just took it easy. I had a really nice meal on the plane and then I slept. Yeah, one of the things that I'm really mindful of when I go to WWDC is trying to avoid getting sick when I get home , right? And that's why I ended up sleeping all the way back to the East Coast because I had a family trip planned right after WWDC and I needed a little bit of rest and in order to be ready for that trip, but also just to avoid getting sick because you know you're in a lot of spaces with large groups of people and you're a little bit overworked and tired and on and on and on and so far knock on wood I've been able to stay healthy . Have you seen me? And if you didn't, I mean that was my goal . You didn't see me quite often and quite sneakily . So put hand sanitizer on my hands. Oh, I didn't see you doing that. I was washing my hands a lot too, but I feel bad . I feel bad doing it in front of people. Maybe I just shook somebody's hand. And I mean it's not that I don't, I mean it's not that I want to it's not that I'm like I'm not like a germophob or anything , but because I got sick and really sick so many times at these events I learned my lesson. So I love shaking people's hands. I love hugging people, I love saying hi to people, but then it just, you find know, a quiet corner and put hand sanitizer on my hands. Good. No, that's good. You don't want people to think you're making a comment about their friendliness . I really am not. I really am not yeah , anyways , we have a lot of news to cover since we took a week off, a bunch of things have happened. We are saving a lot of steam and valve related follow up plus some John Controller corner. It's a recurring section of the show. We're seeing some of that for NPC Excel for Athletrian members , but we still have plenty of news to cover on the main show. Before we get to that, two follow up items, John New, you are receiving a package soon. I am the SN operator is in the mail. It actually went from Texas to North Carolina back to Georgia. Rocky Running. No, that's that's wrong. That's not how it's supposed to be. At least according to the parcel app, it went from North somewhere a few hours north of here, back to Georgia, and then back to North Carolina. It is in the Charlotte area. I will probably not have it today. My guess it's one of those, it's the GoFo or GOFO, one of those fairly cheap delivery services that a lot of these companies use and I expect it will be showing up probably beginning of next week for the next episode . But I have been looking on the subreddit epilogue and a lot of people in the US are starting to get them . So they're I know and the week before is when they started or the week before two weeks before they started arriving Europe , so a lot of people are getting them and judging from what I saw in the subret, a lot of people are really excited and very happy with them. I'm looking forward to getting it. Hopefully it'd be great if it came tomorrow and Saturday because a lot of times the last mile of these delivery services is handled by the U. S. Postal Service. So hopefully if there's a Saturday delivery I, can actually try it out a little bit early on the weekend. Nice . John, can I interest you in a three thousand dollars SSD for the PlayStation five? You cannot. I would love to have an eight term. I would love to have an eight terabyte SSD on the day. Okay, here's a question here's a question. Here's a question. So this is the new Sandisk Optimus GX Pro SSD comes in multiple sizes, including an eight terabyte three thousand dollars . I mean, technically it's like twenty six thousand nine hundred plus taxes or something. Sure, sure . But like my question is, are there enough PS five exclusives to fill eight terabytes? Well, that's a good question. I'm not entirely . Now, you know, you could dig a lot deeper, you could, you know, it doesn't have to be exclusives. You could, you know, could bring your whole PS four catalog and a bunch of other things over and store it on there. That price struck me as incredibly expensive. So I went and looked on Amazon at some external SSDs. And while external SSDs have jumped in price significantly since the end of last year . This particular SSD, I mean, it's internal for one thing. And it's also very high end fast storage. So compared to something like an external USB three point two drive. It's about twice as expensive as that and all of them have doubled or tripled or quadrupled in value and cost on top of that . So this is really if you want to find the most expens ive storage you could possibly get for anything, this is right up there, I think. Eighterabytes. Three terabytes, three thousand dollars . Yeah , how about that? We are going to be talking about cost and money some more. Yeah. Starting unfortunately, starting with the new MSI claw. So we talked about the MSI claw eight weeks ago. XAI plus . Can you throw another name Mic cycler eight , EX AI plus . We now know that the early bird pr icing, so consider yourself lucky when you go to best buy and you see this thing for sale for the sweet sweet price of seventeen hundred dollars as an early early bird pricing for this device, which will go up to eighteen hundred eventually . Yeah. That's more than we expected. I mean, I think we talked about a show a few weeks ago and we said , Oh minimum fifteen hundred dollars, but I really wasn't thinking it would be more than sixteen hundred or so myself. eighteen's a lot . It's not great . Not great. And this whole situation is not getting better. I think it's I think getting worse still . I think too. One of the things that I've observed is I think that we're pretty well tuned into it, you know, people in the gaming world have been who dealing with handhelds are more tuned into this than most people because this hit the hardest on the smaller companies that are making a lot of these handhelds. And you know, we're always buying micro SD cards and things like that. The people in the Apple World didn't know how good they had it until this week when Tim Cook did an interview with the Wall Street Journal and basically said yes, prices on computers and iPhones and things are going up. And I knew that that was coming because we knew from dealing with handhelds on this show and looking at projections that people have made about the price of storage and RAM that this problem is not going away anytime soon. It's right now, I'd say most projections show high prices through at least the end of next year. So that's another eighteen months . That's not great. Continuing down this roundup of money related items, I also wanted to mention that there's now an indigo campaign for the we also mentioned this one before the one XPlayer X two mini pro . So this has Strip Salo inside, all right. It comes with a max plus three hundred and eighty eight . That's a eight core forty GPU cores. It's the Redon eighty six eighty sixty S . It starts at two thousand four hundred sixty six dollars . I mean it's a great handled . It's OLED, it's got an eight and a half inch screen, it's got a lot of storage, a lot of a lot of memory. Better specs than a Legion Go two, for example, because you have Sixilo, obviously and it looks to be I mean it looks like a really really terrific handle especially if you are interested in stuff at the high end of the spectrum but yeah twenty five hundred dollars on ind iegogo and then you can buy extra batteries for eighty one dollars each . So yeah these things gonna chew through batteries. It's, you know , I really don't I really don't know how many people are purchasing these devices right now. I wonder when these devices just stop being made because I cannot imagine that there is much of a market for a twenty five hundred dollar held. With windows . Yeah , look, I don't know . Honestly, I don't know. Enough about money, let's talk about some cool stuff. There's a new special foldable mode with g ame pad controls . So this is something that Google announced and it's going to be added to Android seventeen . Initially, I think only on the Google Pixel fold lineup and maybe eventually it's going to be available to other foldable devices . Essentially now when you're playing a game on a foldable and you're sort of holding the foldable with the one portion of the inner display up and the other down . So you're holding it like in landscape . The bottom part of the display will show you a virtual game pad. So it turns it into simple something that resembles a DS essentially. Yeah. Basically . Now this is something that you could have achieved before with some emulators, with some third party skins . There are plenty of emulators that kind of do this sort of thing for foldables and using the virtual top screen for showing you the game and the lower half for controls. This is now an official Android feature and Google is going to test it on the pixel fold line and I really hope we get it eventually on Samsung stuff for example. I think it looks really nice. I wonder if it's going to be themeable by developers . I hope so, since it's Android, I mean, why wouldn't you be able to customize it? Right. Do you think Apple would never do this with a photo foldable phone? I don't think so . Maybe I could see Apple do an API instead of designing the controller. I could see Apple designing like an API to tell developers design your controller because I really cannot imagine Apple designing a video game controller . Yeah, it's kind of funny really . For as much as you will love Apple to design a controller, I think Apple would just say, yes, we're giving you a virtual game controller API that game developers can implement in their game. It just seems like the kind of thing that's better at the OS level that it seems like it should be an OS feature and not a game feature. You know what I mean? Yeah, I know. John, can you tell me about what Belkin did ? Yeah, so they've got a Joy Con grip that they are marketing now that for you don't have this one, right? , I don't, I don't. So you know, Belkin makes all kinds of accessories for a lot of Apple Gear, but also for the switch. The switch has been something they've been getting into just the last couple of years. If you remember months ago we talked about they have a case, a carrying case for the Switch two that also has a battery built into it so you can basically put your put your switch in there, plug it in with a USB C cable and charge on the go . We had a little conversation I think about whether that was a good idea or not or whether it would melt the case, burn the case, whatever. I don't know. It seemed a little weird, but they've got that. They've had couple a versions of that. These are grips for the Joy Con that have a battery that also attaches kind of squarely in the center of the back of the switch. So you're combining both the grip part as well as charging on the same at the same time. It looks very bulky, it looks very heavy. I don't know. It does I wasn't attracted to it at all. I'm going to talk about a different grip type thing that I got in Excel , but yeah, I don't know. It's there are things you can do. You know, we've talked too about the Genki has like the ten thousand millimp hour battery that is mag safe that you can attach to the back of various handhelds that that to me it's I think the Belkin is also ten thousand millimeter hours. But the Balkan I mean the Genki one looks a lot slimmer. So I'm not sure what's going on with Belkin. They've just got a lot of a lot of plast ic going on there. It looks a little too bulky to me . Yeah . Ambernik is back to teasing mode . And this one is interesting. So Dalkin is teasing its first snapdra gon handheld . It's called the RG fifty five G one suggesting that they're going to use the, you know, potentially like the G one Gen two Snapdragon chipset. Yeah. This would be the first time that Ambernik is doing a qual based device . And if you take a look at the first pictures for the RG fifty one fifty five G one, it looks like it looks like a Nintendoit Swch Light meets an AN Odin two or maybe a retro one of the Retroid handles on the Retroids. There's a lot of similarities between those various devices. It looks really interesting to me. So this has a five point five inch display. Yeah, three D Hollifect joysticks , available in multiple colors. You have the sticks at the bottom, D pad at the top, available in a really nice looking purple, but also a really nice white or light gray . And we don't have more details than this so we don't even have confirmation that it's a snapdragon, although based on the way that they tend to name their their devices, it's pretty clear that this is from the G one family of Snapdragon ships. They're teasing it as a new core , a new a new frontier this is fascinating to me because it's almost it almost feels like Ambernik starting to approach AN or Retroid territory , which obviously once you're you know, we've talked about this many times with Brendan , like once you're done covering all the potential options that you have at the low end , you can only go upstream at some point. And this seems to me like Embernik trying to go up market and trying to say, well, okay, fine. Now we have all the possible game boys. We have a we have a fake PSP. We have a fake Nitano DS, plenty of game boy like handles , let's try and make a proper Android base. Yeah, it seems to me like what they're trying to do is they've got like a two prong strategy. One is let's move kind of into the mid range closer to where retroid and some of the AN stuff is. But also let's get weird with the with the low end which is, you know, the rotate. So I you know, I like that. I think I think getting weird with the low end keeps the company interesting and inching into the mid range . You know, they've they're big enough of these smaller players Amberk's big enough that maybe they can do this at a price competitive point, which would be good to see. Yeah . Yeah. We'll keep an eye on this one. I'm sure I want to I want to hear Brandon's reaction when he's back. Yeah . Speaking of retro, John, what's going on with the pocket six? Well, the pocket six is back and it is It is. It's back and it's got a new twelve gigabyte configuration . So you know, it's available in silver . I don't know. And silver, something a of color called sixteen bit and black and it's good to see it back. I don't know, I don't have much to say about it other than in a world where we open the show talking about three thousand dollars SSD s and a two thousand five hundred dollars windows handheld , getting a retro pocket back , even if it's slightly configured a little differently, it'll spec a little lower than it might have been. You know, it's a positive thing, I think. I agree. Moving on, we're covering all of our favorite companies today. Okay. We are a little bit I'm saving my favorite for last and next Tremui. Tremui, they officially unveiled the Brick Pro and the Brick Hammer Pro U the pre orders are open for the Brick Pro . So to kind of catch you up , so these are three point nine five inch displays . The Brick Pro has in the A one thirty three chipset and it's running on the usual Trimui Linux back end . The Hammer Pro U has the same display but a snapdragon G two gen one with adrenographics and it comes with six gigs of RAM and one hundred and twenty eight gigs of storage and runs Android . So I wanted to ask you, John , which one do you like more? The Brick Pro or the Brick Hammer Pro U . The Hammer Pro U think the Android is what gets me, right? Yeah, at the end of the day, being able to put cocoon on this, something like that . Yeah , I've been trying not to pay too much attention to this story because it came out while we were away and as soon as I saw what the specs were and that it runs Android, I thought, oh boy this, is one I might to order. Yeah, it's it's one hundred the Hammer Pro U it's two hundred dollars basically like in the standard configuration looks really nice. So compared to the obviously this is more this is a pro version of the brick . So you got your dual analog sticks at the bottom . And obviously it's a little heftier because of that . But I'm very intrigued by the Android version . I really, really loved the original Tremui brick because it was so portable and the screen was so crisp and bright. Yeah . This one 's bigger it's heftier. Bigger, heavier, but ones I android and I don't know, I've been looking for a modern game boy, especially since I tattooed a game boy on my arm a few weeks ago. I've been looking to find a modern game boy and there's some options from Embernik, from Eanio . But I don't know, I've also been thinking about this and trying to avoid the trim you I store, but I think eventually I'm gonna cave and just yeah I kind of hear you on the vertical handheld because I feel like we're still kind of searching for vertical hand held perfection and you know A and EO has had some interesting entries there , but they've been very expensive too . And this is a little bit more, I mean, it's still this trim UI brick isn't cheap. On the other hand, it's a little it's not A and EO territory either. Yeah . It's it's also sold out at the moment. Oh, is it? Well, that's good for my budget at least. Yeah. So it's not long it's no longer available from the Trim UI store . You can get it known. I think there's a third party seller that I saw who's also sold out. The Hammer Pro U is also sold out . Yeah, we'll see. We'll see I mean I got plenty of stuff to play with at the moment. So I'm going to talk about it. Same. All right, we're going to wrap it up favorite company . Hey Anio. Hey , Boy . A couple of things from Aenil . The Pocket Micro two is being teased as a Gent two powerhouse. John, remind us what is the original Pocket Micro? The Pocket Micro is a little Yes, I do. Mistaken okay. It's like the Game Boy Micro kind of. I mean , it's a candy bar style, very small screen handheld, which is really lovely device . Really nice , really premium materials, also a fantastic screen. I don't play it a lot, but I'm still glad I have it because it's really nice for things like Game Boy Advance . And this is, you know, the this is the sequel to that. This is their ANEO's bump up the specs version of this . We don't know any more than this except we don't know the ANIO . We do know it's a Gen two powerhouse Federica. And also a retro's new icon which is also what they say . I love these ANIOTs. They're the best. Yeah, they are good. They do a good job with their product photography and all that stuff. Yeah. And over the top flank photos really over the top descriptions and everything. So remember a while back we talked about the ARNEL Pocket play. You may be like , What's the Pocket Play? It's the fake Experia phone that they're making, the slide out phone , Brandon's dream device, essentially. And this device is now real. They showed it off computax, I think. Yeah . That's right. It's a thick phone . All right. Yeah . It's China only and it's a chunky device . PCWord was able to go hands on with the phone . It looks fantastic. I mean, it looks good. They came away saying it's very complicated. It's very complicated , which is not something that you want to hear said about a mobile phone, really. Not really . There are some weird limitations . I mean, beyond the China release and the fact that it's so heavy and thick . And somehow it also comes with cameras , really basic cameras, obviously because all of their attention has been on the gaming side . But it's got a six point six point eight inch OLED display, a dimensity nine thousand three hundred chipset, so don't expect a snapdragon on this thing , I don't know, it looks so nice and I can already tell that that D pad is gonna be so clicky. I can tell from the pictures and the videos that that D pad is one clicky D pad . Yeah . I think it's worth noting too that this was actually not made by ANIO. It was not designed or manufactured by them. It was designed and manufactured by A mobile, which I assume is a Chinese carrier . They did it together and they, you know, they worked on it with MediaTech and A mobile. So I mean it has kind of that A and EO aesthetic for sure . And you're right, it does look like super clicky buttons. Yes, yes. So what's he? I want to see if it eventually comes out like proper reviews from normal people. I'm sure some folks will try and import it from China somehow. They show up in Europe at some point. I mean, don't let more of the Chinese phones end up showing up in Europe than they do in the US Some of them more southern the US for sure. Yeah. But yeah, we'll see. We'll see. But you got a lovely , I mean, just the sheer the sheer courage to bring this thing to market. I mean yeah, I mean, this seems like one of the things that probably should have fallen off the plane when they were having trouble. Right It really seems like it. A company that wants to focus and prioritize. Yeah, this is not their bread and butter. This is a stretch for a company that they were like making a phone. We're making a phone and it slides up and it's got control and it takes a lot of engineering that goes into that sort of thing. But you got power to them . And that brings us my friends to the end of this regular episode of NPC. We just needed to clear the deck with a bunch of links and things that we saved in the couple of weeks that we were off on NPC Excel, we are going to continue catching up on all the steam OS and valve related things that are happening as we speak . And John has some hardware to show off as well. So that you can catch on NPC Excel, which you can get for just five dollars a month on our Patreon. If you just search for an exportable console, you'll find us there. All right, well thanks everybody for joining us. We'll be back in another week. I think with Brendan, you know, we'll be all back together once again . In the meantime, you know, find Brendan over at Wavelength . Online. You can find me and Federico over at Macstories dot net and all three of us are on social media. Just search for our names there. Talk to you next week, Federicoo. Bye, Jhn