When AYN entered the x86 scene in 2022, it was a resounding mess. Six different overlapping models, a long and convoluted development cycle that left backers waiting a year or more for their devices, and a slew of cancellations that shuffled people’s orders from canceled SKU to canceled SKU – it’s no wonder everyone, including AYN, seems to want to forget the Loki.
Except for Brazil, apparently.
A promo render of the rebranded device.
Enter Tectoy, who recently announced the Zeenix – a very familiar-looking, square-ish PC handheld with a 6-inch screen and two very different variants. The cheaper Zeenix Lite sports an Athlon 3050e processor, 256GB of NVMe storage, and 8GB of dual-channel DDR4 RAM. The more powerful Zeenix Pro features a Ryzen 6800U, a well-known chipset in the handheld PC space, along with 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM and 512GB of storage.
The back of a Zeenix device, with their shiny new logo.
Some people speculated that these were cheap knockoffs of the AYANEO Air lineup. But those familiar with AYN’s portfolio will notice that these specs look awfully similar to the Loki Zero and Loki Max. So what’s happening? Has this Brazilian company just knocked off AYN’s old design to sell on its own? Did they stumble upon an abandoned warehouse full of unsold Lokis?
Who is Tectoy?
Some readers will already be familiar with Tectoy as the company that rather infamously continues to sell the Sega Master System to this very day. Their business model mainly revolves around licensing and re-packaging tech products from companies outside of Brazil, such as 8BitDo or Sega. This business model exists because Brazil has incredibly high import tariffs on electronic products which are not ‘Brazilian-made’.
Tectoy can sell their white-label products at much lower prices than the same products imported directly from abroad and still make a tidy profit, despite many of these products not actually being manufactured or even assembled in Brazil. Taxes are weird.
It seems that Tectoy has struck a similar deal with AYN. A tweet posted by the new Zeenix head of marketing, Pedro Caxa, shows a handful of Tectoy employees out at dinner with three AYN employees:
(Source: X/Twitter)
(Translation: The day we took the AYN crowd to eat coxinha and drink cachaça. At this point, Loki hadn’t even been launched; they gave us a prototype in hand and since then we’ve helped with the development of the product 🙂 )
So supposedly, Tectoy was involved in the development of the Loki at some point. Could this explain why AYN struggled so much with development? Probably not, but it’s still interesting.
We don’t have any pricing info on the Zeenix yet; the website just has a form for anyone interested to sign up to their e-mail ‘VIP List’. Availability outside Brazil is quite limited, so if you’re interested in a Loki, it’s best to scour the used market. Regardless, we’ll be keeping an eye on this one for sure.
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