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

You can still find the Asus Xbox Ally X and the MSI Claw 8 AI Plus for $999 and $1,049 respectively, but Lenovo’s Legion Go S has seemingly given up the fight. The best version of Lenovo’s 8-inch handheld now costs nearly double what it did at launch — originally $829.99 last summer, the SteamOS version with Z1 Extreme chip now costs a staggering $1,579.99 at Best Buy.

That’s an even bigger price hike than with Lenovo’s flagship Legion Go 2, which saw up to a $650 price hike early this month.

Remember when we thought the Legion Go 2 was expensive at $1,099 and up? Those were the days — Best Buy is now listing Lenovo’s handheld for $1,499 with a Ryzen Z2 or $1,999 with a Z2 Extreme. The latter originally cost $1,349, so that’s a $650 jump in just six months.

And yes, that means Lenovo’s flagship may now cost twice as much as a $999 Microsoft/Asus Xbox Ally X with the same AMD chip, as much as a far more powerful GPD Win 5 with AMD Strix Halo cost last year. But the way things are going, it’s probably only a matter of time till Microsoft hikes its handheld Xbox price too. (For now, Asus rep Anthony Spence tells me there’s “no price increase on the horizon, so far as I can tell,” at least in the US.)

Valve has just released SteamOS 3.8.0 in preview, and it’s a doozy.

Not only is it the first release to support the upcoming Steam Machine living room gaming PC, it comes with long-awaited features for Valve’s handhelds and more support for other companies’ handhelds than we’ve seen to date — including Microsoft and Asus’ Xbox Ally series, the Lenovo Legion Go 2, the OneXPlayer X1, and additional support for MSI, GPD, Anbernic, OrangePi, and Zotac.

In January, Qualcomm hinted to The Verge that it might finally bring its powerful Arm-based Snapdragon processors to Windows gaming handhelds at the 2026 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco — just in time to challenge Nvidia’s own first Arm gaming CPU and Intel’s first dedicated handheld gaming chips.

But plans have shifted, Qualcomm now tells me. It won’t announce any updates to its Snapdragon G Series gaming chips there, nor offer the recently announced updates to the Snapdragon X line for journalists to try or benchmark.

Valve has updated the Steam Deck website to say that the Steam Deck OLED may be out of stock “intermittently in some regions due to memory and storage shortages.” The PC gaming handheld has been out of stock in the US and other parts of the world for a few days, and thanks to this update, we now know why.

The update comes shortly after Valve delayed the Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and Steam Controller from a planned shipping window of early 2026 because of the memory and storage crunch. “We have work to do to land on concrete pricing and launch dates that we can confidently announce, being mindful of how quickly the circumstances around both of those things can change,” Valve said in a post about that announcement from earlier this month.

As we predicted, the world’s biggest consumer electronics show was a bit of a bust for gamers this year! CES 2026 brought us several neat gamepads, but barely any handhelds and no new desktop GPUs — not from Nvidia, not from Intel, and not from AMD.

But if you dig deep, AMD said two things at this year’s show that are worthy of attention. Did you catch that the company’s about to make socketed mobile chips again? Or that its answer to Intel is to lower the price of its monster Strix Halo silicon?

Intel announced yesterday that it’s developing an entire “handheld gaming platform” powered by its new Panther Lake chips and joining an increasingly competitive field. Qualcomm is hinting about potential Windows gaming handhelds showing up at the Game Developers Conference in March, and AMD’s new Strix Halo chips could lead to more powerful handhelds.

According to IGN and TechCrunch, sources say Intel is going to compete by developing a custom Intel Core G3 “variant or variants” just for handhelds that could outperform the Arc B390 GPU on the chips it just announced. IGN reports that by using the new 18A process, Intel can cut different die slices, and “spec the chips to offer better performance on the GPU where you want it.”

One year ago, Lenovo became the first company besides Valve to announce a handheld with SteamOS instead of Windows. The result was the Legion Go S with SteamOS; no Steam Deck killer due to price and battery life, but a big step forward in performance and pick-up-and-play portability.

Now, Lenovo’s doing it again — it’s bringing SteamOS to the Legion Go 2, its flagship handheld with detachable Nintendo Switch-like controllers and the most advanced screen in a handheld yet. Lenovo plans to begin selling a SteamOS version in June starting at $1,199, the company just announced at CES 2026 in Las Vegas. Specs are otherwise the same.

AMD’s Strix Halo, aka “Ryzen AI Max,” is a hugely expensive chip that includes some of the most powerful integrated graphics ever made. Though AMD initially marketed it more to AI workloads with its tremendous complement of up to 128GB of RAM, it’s also inspired some unprecedented gaming designs — by far the most powerful handheld, the Framework Desktop, and this monster Asus tablet.

But all those machines cost around $2,000, even before today’s global RAM shortages. Maybe that’ll change now that AMD’s announcing two lower-end Ryzen AI Max Plus parts with full-fat graphics but fewer CPU cores, specifically aimed at gaming devices.

Acer made a big splash at CES 2025 with the announcement of its surfboard-sized Nitro Blaze 11 gaming handheld, but its targeted second-quarter release came and went long ago. There’s been no word of the chunky 11-inch Blaze or its smaller siblings. I was initially hyped enough to try such an oversized handheld that I turned Asus’ gaming tablet into one.

So when I met with Acer reps to go over its new offerings for CES 2026, I asked about this absence.

The most affordable Steam Deck, the $399 LCD model, is not available in the US. And, according to the Steam Deck site, it won’t be coming back. Underneath the listings for the various models is a note that says:

And, well, it’s no longer in stock on the US site.

Even at $1,000, the Xbox Ally X handheld didn’t ship with magnetic drift-resistant joysticks, and neither did the $600 model. But for an extra $20 at Amazon, you can change that today — with officially Asus-approved and sanctioned TMR joysticks from Gulikit, the company that’s made a name for itself by supplying aftermarket drift-resistant sticks.

The company says it worked with Xbox Ally manufacturer Asus to create these sticks, that they’ll be “automatically recognized” when you swap them in, and that you can use the handheld’s built-in Armoury Crate app to calibrate them afterwards.

My favorite kind of update is the one that gives my gadgets entirely new features and specs for free — and Microsoft is unleashing one of those today by bringing Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) Audio to its 2024 Xbox Wireless Headset, which unlocks a lot of those new features!

It could bring better battery life, lower latency, and perhaps most importantly, palatable voice chat when paired with Microsoft’s “Xbox” handhelds like the Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X. (The older Bluetooth Classic mode requires more bandwidth than Bluetooth LE, so you typically see a big drop in audio quality with Bluetooth Classic when you try to add two-way voice communication to your audio stream.)

I still wouldn’t buy an Xbox Ally, and I still don’t think the tweaked version of Windows that shipped with it is ready for primetime. The Xbox Full Screen Experience (FSE) needs work. But two months after I panned the cheaper $600 white Xbox Ally and wasn’t quite sold on the $1,000 black one, one of my most-hated Windows issues is getting better.

I didn’t stop testing these handhelds after my October review; I’ve been playing Hollow Knight: Silksong and Blue Prince on them ever since. I installed FSE on an MSI Claw 8 AI Plus, too. And after too many updates to count, I’m finally beginning to trust two of these handhelds to save my game (and battery life) when I put them to sleep. Even the third isn’t as bad as it was.

December 31st, 2025 is the deadline to save the Google Stadia controller. That’s less than three weeks from today — but there’s never been a better time. Last month, I discovered the controller is finally a first-class citizen in Steam and SteamOS.

The Stadia controller was originally designed to connect to your Wi-Fi network and remotely control games from Google’s cloud servers. But when Stadia shut down in January 2023, the company did an amazing job shutting down the service: it offered full hardware refunds and let you rescue the Stadia Controller by turning it into a generic Bluetooth gamepad instead.

It’s a big deal that Valve is making a game console. But I’m beginning to think the Steam Machine may end up a footnote in gaming history. What if Valve could bring PC games not just to its own living room consoles, but also to the Arm chips that billions of people have in their phones? What if you no longer had to wait for game developers to do the hard work of porting PC games to your phone, Mac, or other Arm hardware, because games built for desktop PCs could just work?

If you wrote off the Steam Frame as yet another VR headset few will want to wear, I guarantee you’re not alone. But the Steam Frame isn’t just a headset; it’s a Trojan horse that contains the tech gamers need to play Steam games on the next Samsung Galaxy, the next Google Pixel, perhaps Arm gaming notebooks to come.