As exciting as the Odin Thor that went on sale earlier this week is, we are overdue for an Ayn Odin refresh.
It has been about 2 years since the Ayn Odin 2 released and it’s still one of the most powerful and sought after handhelds in the space. No they aren’t hard to get but they are definitely more expensive than your average Anbernic or Retroid device.
Ayn has just teased us again on the Odin 3 with a single image. It appears to be a flatter Odin Portal with a bigger screen. If I was a betting man and I am I would put my money on the Odin 3 having the beautiful 6” 120Hz 1080×1920 650nits display found in the Ayn Thor.
From the single image that was posted the Ayn Odin 3 appears to have similar ergonomics to the Odin 1. It was fine when it released but expectations have changed a lot in the last few years. I’m sure as other Ayn/Retroid recent offerings there will be a TPU case released at launch to address this.
CPU
There is a lot of people online that seem to think the Odin 3 will come with the same Snapdragon SD8Gen2 that Ayn has been using on all their handhelds including the recently released Thor the last couple years. I’m going to be the one who says it’s going to be a different Snapdragon SOC.
There are pros and cons to changing out the SOC but I’m not sure they have a choice. Outside of Ayn stating “Odin 3 – A New Era Begins”, they have been using the same internals for a couple years now.
The advantage of the SD8Gen2 is the numerous custom GPU drivers allowing even more emulation on system it might otherwise struggle with. There really isn’t anything that we have reviewed that can out emulates the Odin 2.
If Ayn is planning on making it 2 years again with the Odin 3 and they stayed with the current SOC it would be 5 years young when they prepare to release the next generation. The SD8Gen2 came out in November of 2022.
[Edit: Ayn Released this teaser video of the Odin 3 right after we posted this article]
Chipset Options
I think the options Ayn has is either the Snapdragon SDG3xGen3 which is a slightly more optimized SD8Gen3 and performs well with emulation as part of the Snapdragon Mobile Gaming line of CPUs.
The other option I think they have is the Snapdragon SD8Elite. This is one of if not the most powerful ARM SOC on offer today. The problem is that it currently emulates through brute force as there is also a lack of driver support for this GPU.
The third option would be to offer both SOC options. The first time we have seen multiple SOC options from Ayn was the Odin 1. They offered both the Odin Lite with Dimensity D900 and the Odin Basic/Pro/Max models running on the Snapdragon SD845 equipped with various RAM options as well. The Snapdragon devices definitely performed the best, but the Dimensity SOC offered 4G mobile through a tablet plan on the D900.
After writing this all out I think they are likely to go with the third option. This would be similar to how Ayaneo releases their handhelds with a high power, high dollar option that’s almost always the first to sell out pre-sale. Then a lower power entry level device that they use in their marketing followed by “starting as low as” and have a $200-400 gap to the “limited edition” model.
This would however cause a fairly big price gap between SOC options unless Ayn decides it’s time to generally raise even their introductory price to better align with competitor Ayaneo and create space to better differentiate from Retroid. Ayn’s quality is typically better so they may no longer feel they need/want the price advantage they’ve had the last few years.
Pricing?
Ayn hasn’t released pricing along with their teaser and it’s honestly going to be hard to estimate without knowing some more details. Ayn has historically stuck to a price structure which will give us a base once we have more details.
At minimum I would expect the Odin 3 to start around $339 like the Odins of past releases. If they stuck to their current structure they would top out around $499 but I’m not sure that’s possible if they go with a much higher powered current SOC, granted Ayn seems to pull miracles when it comes to obtaining chipsets.
If this is a typical Ayn launch the handheld Pre-Orders should go live in the next couple weeks. We should also receive more images, a video teaser and pricing shortly.
If you want to stalk Ayn’s website for the next few days like myself or checkout the other Ayn models the link is below.
Are you interested in picking up the Ayn Odin 3 and/or Ayn Thor?
GameOn
CellPhish
[edit: video above released moments after article so we added it for the viewers]
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