AYANEO has officially pulled the curtain back on the Pocket Play, its Xperia Play-inspired gaming phone that looks like a big ole brick. The company’s latest teaser on X shows off the device’s chunky, rectangular silhouette and side‑slide gamepad.
Under the hood, AYANEO has confirmed it’s using MediaTek’s Dimensity 9300 as the brains of the operation. That’s a pretty new high‑end mobile SoC with a big focus on GPU performance and power efficiency, putting Pocket Play in flagship territory. In practice, it should have more than enough headroom for high-end emulation, cloud streaming, and native Android titles, assuming AYANEO keeps thermals and sustained performance in check inside that dense little chassis.
On the outside, the Pocket Play is built around a 6.8‑inch OLED display at 2400×1080, with a 165 Hz refresh rate. Slide that brick-shaped screen up and you get a full set of controls, plus the usual shoulder buttons tucked along the top edge.
Pocket Play isn’t due to actually land in people’s hands until sometime in 2026 (allegedly), and AYANEO has already spun up a Kickstarter landing page. That campaign page is still in “Launching Soon” mode, but it mirrors the core details from AYANEO’s own posts and teaser trailer.
If nothing else, Pocket Play is AYANEO being AYANEO: instead of chilling out and just selling a normal Android handheld, they’re making a dense little rectangle and cramming a phone into it. Whether that rectangular Swiss Army Play actually lands will probably come down to price, thermals, and how good those controls feel once people start sliding it open in the wild.
Source: AYANEO X
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