Last year, gaming handheld brand teased Ayaneo Pocket Play, a one-of-a-kind Android smartphone with a built-in gaming pad and slide-out mechanism. Expected to launch sometime in 2026, the brand has been slowly revealing new details about the device. Now, it has confirmed the chipset the smartphone will run on.
Ayaneo Pocket Play will be powered by the Dimensity 9300 chip
Ayenao, in its latest blog post, has revealed that the Pocket Play will rely on the Dimensity 9300 for performance. This is MediaTek's 2023 flagship octa-core SoC, with 4 Cortex-X4 cores clocked at 3.25 GHz and 4 Cortex-A720 cores clocked at 2.0 GHz. In terms of performance, the chipset is close to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 from Qualcomm.
This makes this an interesting choice since the last phones that featured the Dimensity 9300 are the Vivo X100 Pro and Oppo Find X7. Ayeneo could have opted for a newer chipset, especially considering the fact that the Pocket Play will launch in 2026. It could have taken the Vivo X200T route with the Dimensity 9400+.
However, unlike those phones, the Ayeneo Pocket Play is definitely unique and there is nothing in the market that currently resembles it. Beyond just a regular smartphone, the Pocket Play is fitted with a full-fledged D-pad, ABXY buttons and dual touchpads. All the controls are neatly stacked under the display and using a slide-out mechanism, folks can turn their smartphone into a fully functional gaming handheld.
Moreover, the smartphone will also come with physical shoulder trigger buttons and a full metal and glass build for that touch of premiumness. Aside from that, Ayaneo has not made the other specs of the phone official. There is no word on an official launch date as well.
It will be listed in the USA via Kickstarter and interested folks will be able to pledge when the page goes live. That said, there is no doubt that the Ayaneo Pocket Play will be one of the most interesting hardware experiments in 2026. It remains to be seen if there is a sizable market for hybrid phones. With RAM prices soaring, it will be interesting to see how well-priced the smartphone is.
