A few years ago, there was a moment when I felt like the only thing that could make the Steam Deck better was if it would ditch Linux for Windows. That turned out to be one heck of a monkey’s paw. As soon as competing handhelds flooded the market, all equipped with Microsoft’s OS, I realized exactly why Valve didn’t go in that direction. Windows is a total pain to navigate in devices like the Legion Go for countless reasons. The Steam Deck was protecting me from myself all this time.
So forgive me if I was a little skeptical when Microsoft revealed the ROG Xbox Ally. While I used to dream of a portable device like this that was built around Xbox Game Pass, I was filled with some mild dread when the big day finally came. I just didn’t want to struggle with another Windows handheld. Thankfully, Asus and Microsoft have seemingly read the room. Following the device’s announcement at the Xbox Games Showcase, Digital Trends went hands-on with the handheld and learned much more about its internals. The good news? All of the pesky parts of Windows have been cut out in favor of a more focused gaming device.
The most important thing I learned is that this isn’t simply a regular ROG Ally with an Xbox logo slapped on the box. Sure, its guts may have some similarities, but key parts of it have been rebuilt. That starts with the design, as the Xbox Ally trades in rounded edges for traditional controller grips to bring the device more in line with a gamepad. That puts it somewhere between a ROG Ally and a PlayStation Portal in terms of comfort. Impulse triggers further soup the package up, which is a nice touch. The only problem is that it’s quite heavy. Even after no more than 10 minutes holding it up, I could definitely feel some strain forming in my wrist.
There are plenty of specs to pour over here, including the pricier Xbox Ally X’s Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme or its 120Hz display, but the most important thing about it is that Windows has been entirely redesigned for it. Microsoft has taken a page out of Valve’s playbook and crafted its own bespoke gaming UI here. The main menu is similar to that of the Steam Deck’s showing off all recently played games in a tidy little row. Any games downloaded on the device will show up in the UI, so it isn’t only compatible with Game Pass titles. It’s an all-in-one approach to PC gaming under an Xbox branding.
The best part of that is that Microsoft has slashed how many pieces of Windows runs while that view is open. Anything that’s not necessary to gaming simply won’t be active, so you won’t have to worry about the calendar app suddenly taking you out of games. That’s an enormous improvement, as the unwieldy nature of handheld Windows often makes these devices so cumbersome to use. Even the sign in UI has been redesigned and built around controller support, with key features like Wi-Fi accessible with some simple controller clicks. Players can still launch a normal version of Windows, but it’s no longer the default experience when booting the system up.
It’s not just about cutting out some minor annoyances; slashing these features saves 2GB. It makes the machine far more efficient, which finally makes gaming on a portable version of Windows more viable. In my demo, I’d play a small slice of Gears of War: Reloaded, which ran shockingly well considering that it’s a fairly robust remaster. I didn’t have enough time with the system to do a full benchmark test, but I was getting a much clearer image at a stable framerate than I would have expected. Xbox even plans to make it easy to tell how well games can run on it with its own version of Steam Deck’s verification system. The plan is now just to tell people if a game can run on the handheld, but how well it runs too.
Asus’ goal here is to streamline the UI all around and it goes a long way. For instance, I can press the Xbox logo on the left side of the device to pull up a pop-up menu that features just about everything I’d need in an Xbox experience. Even better is that the menu also includes Asus’ Armoury Crate app rather than siloing it off into a separate menu. That’s a small consideration, but it’s one that condenses every key menu in one place. I’ll no longer have to fumble around separate menus to find whatever thing I’m looking to tweak or access.
I only got a short introduction to the handheld, which wasn’t nearly enough time to test its power or see how thoroughly it catalogues games from any service into the Xbox interface. Part of me still feels like there must be some sort of hidden trade off that comes with slashing Windows down. Every portable device has some kind of catch and I’m sure we’ll discover the Xbox Ally’s in due time. For now though, I’m optimistic that Asus has fixed the biggest problem with its devices and invented a viable alternative to SteamOS. If this works as well as it seems to, I imagine that Microsoft may salvage its handheld reputation just yet.
