I don’t want to upgrade to the ROG Ally X.

Never let people forget the warranty fiasco until we start seeing an improvement on it

The pricing for the ROG Ally X is simply too exorbitant. In my country, it is priced at $920, which is far too high. At that price point, I could purchase both a PS5 and a Steam Deck LCD

Even as a newly converted Steam Deck skeptic-turned-user, the reason why the Deck is running circles around the rest of the pc handheld space is that everyone else is basically making laptops, machines that are updated every year with slightly better specs, while Valve (seemingly) is treating the Deck as a real console, which is meant to last for years and years without an upgrade. Which is fine for the enthusiast crowd and is creating these improvements for future releases and allows for new jumping on points to the handheld ecosystem, but incremental upgrades don't make a ton of sense for your average consumer who wants to make a purchase and not feel ripped off a year later when the better version shows up

The Ally X is USD$1,065 in Australia (AUD $1599). So dang expensive.

While the upgraded battery and features are appealing, it's hard to justify shelling out that much cash for minimal improvements. It's especially hard when weighing it against its already good predecessor and the emerging competition.

next version of ally will feature a kickstand as its selling features

in Germany the Ally cost 699€ UVP and in 99% of the time its on sale for 579€ and the Ally X launched for 899€ ☠

That battery life is incredible. I'll probably hold off for the Ally 2 or Steamdeck 2. My current Ally is serving me good enough.

Working at BestBuy when the original came out they we had people returning these every single day for the first couple weeks.

shortcircuit at 1 AM? smells like embragio time is up

My boyfriend wanted a Rog Ally. I got myself the Steam Deck because I dislike messing with Windows on a desktop and couldn't imagine myself using the Ally at all. but if nothing better than the Ally X is out by christmas, I'll get him that because I know he'll love it.

I'll wait for the full gen 2 ally at this point.

I don't want to get scammed during warranty repairs for defective hardware, so I don't want to buy from ASUS.

It's a balancing act for sure, choosing between the bigger battery life yet cost-prohibitive aspects of the Ally X and the still solid performance with a smaller price tag of the original Ally.

Excellent review. I don't have a handheld yet hopefully soon 😀

The Steam Deck OLED for Australians is the most expensive of these new wave of handheld PCs, but I still chose to get one over its competitors because I feel Steam is the only company that I can trust to support the device and ecosystem going forward. Its commitment to pushing the platform forward has been proven and tested, they are just doing things nobody else from a hardware or software side are doing. And for markets where the Deck is sold locally, there really isn't any competition on value too.

appreciate the review yeah is expensive but i don't have any other handheld + i play mihoyo games that aren't in steam. 100 bucks more for more battery and storage is not THAT crazy, but it's definitely expensive.

I picked up a Legion Go as an upgrade to the Steam Deck, I ended up turning off half of the CPU Cores as they are over kill and just chew battery, they are upgraded the wrong things in these machines, just increase the GPU cores and the battery size, that's it, there is no point increasing CPU performance, as they are always under utilised and the GPU is always maxed out.

Y'know, with handhelds being on the rise, this would be a good time for a (shudder) Windows 8.1 retrospective. It was designed for touch screens, after all, so I'd be curious to see how it fares on devices like these.

eGPUs are nice in theory but every time I tried using them they're a massive pain. It sometimes takes couple of restarts and 15 minutes of fiddling before the GPU acceleration is working. And waking up from sleep it would stop working too. I would not replace my desktop PC with a handheld + eGPU combo. If you aren't permamently plugged into an enclosure I would just get the original Ally and a powerbank for $60.