Without doubt one of the most surprising recent announcements.
After an April Fool's announcement that nobody believed, ASUS confirmed - just three days later - that it was indeed working on its own handheld console project, as if to compete with Valve and its Steam Deck, then the only masters on board. In June 2023, the ROG ally was officially launched in several countries around the world, and the console seems to have met with some success, since only a few months later, a second version was launched. This version retained most of the elements of June's ROG Ally "Z1 Extreme", with only the central chip modified - the Z1 Extreme gave way to the Z1 - in order to reduce manufacturing costs.
Technical specifications of the ROG Ally "1" © ASUS
A few days ago, at Techlusive's microphone, there was talk of something quite different and, obviously, of a real new console, not just a declination of the ROG Ally. It was ASUS India's vice-president who let the cat out of the bag. While there was no question of making any product official, Arnold Su was nonetheless very clear about the brand's intentions: " ASUS is planning to bring a successor to the device sometime this year: we most likely will launch a second generation [handheld gaming console] this year. We will still keep the Windows features, but we will focus more on gaming ".
In a nutshell, ASUS does indeed have a new, " second-generation " handheld console in the pipeline. It will be released sometime in 2024, and will still be based on Microsoft's Windows operating system. Where things get a little murkier is when Arnold Su talks about " putting more emphasis on video games ". Indeed, it's hard to see how it's possible to put even more emphasis on video games than with a console dedicated to video games like the ROG Ally. Are we talking about a surprise in terms of ergonomics, power and/or autonomy? Since he mentions a release date in 2024, we should soon know, but from the point of view of the relationship of trust with buyers of the first version of the ROG Ally, the decision remains surprising.
