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as a beginner to this game my knowledge is lacking, and so far I have only played one demo game.
I'm looking at starting up properly, and was wondering if anyone could talk me through the game play differences between aleph and panO?

at first glance they both seem to be hi-tech, fairly elite, tough to kill and robot-y.

PanO is a lot less robot-intensive and a lot less elite than Aleph. PanO is a fairly straightforward outgun-the-enemy sort of faction, Aleph can put out a lot more fire at close range and has more manoeuvre/distance-closing tricks. No faction is actually particularly tough to kill, simply because normal infantry have one hit point and three shots.

Aleph actually plays more like Nomads than PanO; they come with medium-armour ODD units that do work in close range and melee instead of PanO's preference for longer range and more armour.

Aleph has more abilities and gear on their side. ODD, chain rifles, dogged, X-visors, personalities, various specialists, martial artists and so on. You do have drawbacks as there are no relatively cheap order generators such as Fusiliers and certain Aleph profiles have frenzy.

Compared to them PanOceania is more focused on direct shooting matches with more dull and mostly regular profiles. You can make PanOceania around REM, hackers and few other more interesting profiles but it always feels you really want to play other army that rewards this sort of play and gets more benefits.

Both can be direct in their play, Aleph just has more various ways on how to approach the problem.

thankyou guys! I think I will probably go ALEPH, mostly because the models look nice. and the idea of an all robot army is cool to me

As mentioned, Aleph is usually about the characters. I find it comming for me to have 2-3 named guy when I build a aleph list. Only time I ever have any in PanO is if im doing knights with Joan