The cheaper $600 Asus ROG Ally is here, and you probably shouldn’t buy it

theverge.com:

By Sean Hollister, a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.

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If you’ve been eying an Asus ROG Ally gaming handheld but can’t quite justify the $700 price tag… you’ll probably want to keep on waiting. Today, the company has begun selling a less-expensive $600 model with a lower-performance AMD Z1 chip, but early reviews suggest the Windows gaming handheld is too compromised to justify the purchase.

Bottom line: Z1 performance is reportedly worse than the $400-and-up Steam Deck, without any significant battery life benefit to make up for the loss of power.

Brief refresher: three months ago, Asus began shipping the ROG Ally, a Windows gaming handheld designed to compete on price and performance with Valve’s Steam Deck. It had a lot going for it, including mostly better-than-Deck performance, an excellent 120Hz variable refresh rate screen that makes everything feel smoother, a delightfully quiet fan, and a plugged-into-the-wall 30W Turbo mode that makes its Z1 Extreme chip even more potent.

But the handheld was held back by impotent software that doesn’t make Windows easy to use handheld, iffy battery life, a weird performance gap between shipping devices and the original review units, and an SD card reader that tended (tends?) to burn out and is still under investigation.

Asus told me in July that it would send me the new $600 Z1 model to test against the original Z1 Extreme, but it never did. Now, I see why: Digital Trends, Retro Game Corps, and PC Mag show it’s simply not an improvement despite the extra money