Steam Deck OLED, ROG Ally, and more: all the news about the handheld PC gaming revolution

Good things often come to gamers who wait. There’s always a slimmer, more power-efficient PlayStation or Xbox on the way. Nintendo has long hammered out attractive new combos of size, screen, color, and battery life for its Game Boy, DS, and Switch.

But Valve, with the new Steam Deck OLED, may have created the best console revision ever.

Your Asus ROG Ally gaming handheld is brilliantly white, and that will not stand: you’ve decided your gadgets must be black. Or… maybe you just want a rugged case that’ll survive a drop or three? Either way, Dbrand thinks it’s got what you need — a $60 Killswitch case like the one it makes for the Steam Deck that’ll ship early next year.

“But wait,” I will pretend to hear some of you thinking, “Didn’t Dbrand royally screw that up? Didn’t The Verge trigger a million-dollar recall when you folks discovered it interfered with a Steam Deck fan?”

Boutique handheld gaming company Ayaneo has announced the Ayaneo Flip DS — a 7-inch 120Hz handheld gaming clamshell with a second screen that’s clearly inspired by the Nintendo DS, and might let it play games like one too.

According to Liliputing’s Brad Linder, who deserves kudos for calling out the company’s attempt to plant a “leak,” both the Flip DS and a similar Flip KB will be powered by AMD’s Ryzen 7 7840U. That’s the same chip that’s in practically every other flagship Windows gaming handheld at the moment, including quite a few from Ayaneo itself.

Think we’re not getting a new Steam Deck just because Valve isn’t ready to upgrade its performance? Think again: Valve already put a new Steam Deck through the FCC’s certification process on August 13th, agency documents reveal.

The mystery “Valve 1030” that went through South Korea’s National Radio Research Agency has now been definitively identified as a Steam Deck in the United States, and it’s our first proof the hardware’s potentially close enough to release to justify showing it to regulators.

Valve has been clear it wants to build a Steam Deck 2 — and equally clear that a faster handheld wouldn’t arrive soon. Now, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais tells The Verge and CNBC that it could be late 2025 or beyond before it raises that bar — because it wants to see a leap in performance without a significant hit to battery life.

“I don’t anticipate such a leap to be possible in the next couple of years,” he told me via email.

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.

The Steam Deck has kick-started a wave of handhelds from some of the big names in PC gaming. Asus has its Windows-powered ROG Ally, Lenovo just announced its own Legion Go handheld PC, and Logitech released a cloud-focused handheld. AMD has been quietly arming an entire new wave of Steam Deck competitors, and that got me thinking: where’s Microsoft’s Xbox handheld?

Since the debut of the Xbox more than 20 years ago, fans have been clamoring for a portable version. During that time, Sony released the PlayStation Portable (PSP) and the PlayStation Vita, and it now plans to launch a $199.99 PlayStation Portal in November that will stream PS5 games. Microsoft has shown little interest in an Xbox handheld of its own, despite prototyping a seven-inch gaming tablet more than 10 years ago.

Would you spend $40–$60 on artisan buttons for your Steam Deck? What if they were cast by hand from custom resin molds, made by just one guy in the USA?

I imagine it would depend on how they look — but thankfully, they look amazing.

The Steam Deck’s biggest weakness is battery life — and yet somehow, every challenger has failed to raise that bar. The Ayaneo 2 showed us that AMD’s Ryzen 6800U wasn’t ready to compete; the Asus ROG Ally revealed that AMD’s Z1 Extreme couldn’t pull ahead if Asus insisted on matching the Steam Deck’s 40 watt-hour battery pack.

But Ayaneo may have an answer: it’s stuffing a 75 watt-hour pack into a larger, heavier handheld called the Ayaneo Kun that — it now claims — can last nearly three and a quarter hours at 15W TDP. That’s nearly double the battery and runtime you’d expect from a Steam Deck at that wattage, though it appears it wasn’t captured while playing a game, exactly.