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

Intel couldn’t catch a break. Layoffs. Shakedowns. Crashing CPUs torpedoing its reputation, sending desktop gamers fleeing to AMD. Apple and Qualcomm pushing Intel out of multiple flagship laptops. A gaming graphics card going MIA. But its Panther Lake laptop chip, the first on its all-important 18A process, turned out excellent — and a handheld version might make Intel the leader in portable gaming chips.

On Monday, I spent two hours with an MSI Claw 8 EX AI Plus handheld atop Intel’s new Arc G3 Extreme. I walked away thinking that next-gen handhelds have finally arrived. The true leap in performance and battery life we’ve been waiting for, but at a high price.

If you asked me what I’d change about the Xbox Ally X handheld — aside from fixing Windows, I mean — I’d tell you two key things.

First, give me a bigger, better screen. Even a little bit bigger, so games feel less claustrophobic and with less ugly bezel. Second, get rid of the “Library” button. I am so tired of an accidental press booting me out of my game and into the Xbox library without a simple way to get back.

Intel is barely in the handheld gaming PC space — but that might be about to change. After the embarrassment that was the first MSI Claw and the excellent MSI Claw 8 AI Plus that followed it, Intel said it would create custom handheld gaming chips. Today, it’s formally announcing them as the Arc G3 and Arc G3 Extreme.

There’s a lot we don’t know about the chips, but Intel’s confirming today that the Panther Lake variant contains two fewer CPU cores than Intel’s Panther Lake laptop chips, but feature a full compliment of Xe3 GPU cores to run games. (They have 2 P-cores, 8 E-eores, and 4 LP E-cores, plus up to 12 Xe3 graphics cores in total.)

For a few glorious years, a $399 portable gadget could run almost anything you’d want to play. In 2022, the Steam Deck finally made PC gaming portable and affordable. I played through the vast majority of Elden Ring on a Steam Deck, agape that such a rich world could comfortably fit between my two hands.

Today, that Steam Deck experience starts at $789 — nearly double the price.

Valve has significantly increased the price of the Steam Deck — but now, it’s also in stock. The 512GB Steam Deck OLED now costs $789, up from $549, while the 1TB model costs $949, up from $649. As I write this, both models are available to buy on Steam with an estimated delivery date of three to five business days.

The company says the price increase is because of “rising memory and storage costs.” Nothing about the Steam Deck has changed, but “these new prices reflect the current state of component costs and other global logistical challenges across the industry as a whole. We’ll keep you updated if anything changes.”

Last November, Valve introduced the world to its new vision of living room gaming: the Steam Machine and Steam Controller. Then, RAMageddon. Memory shortages forced Valve to delay all its hardware and reset expectations.

Now, Valve is releasing the Steam Controller without the Steam Machine.

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.