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

iFixit published a dual teardown of Valve’s Steam Deck OLED and the Lenovo Legion Go today, giving a nice, detailed look inside both handhelds with all of the site’s usual meticulous detail. This being iFixit, the focus is on the consoles’ repairability, and it gave both high marks — a 9 / 10 for the Steam Deck OLED and 8 / 10 for the Lenovo Legion.

The article has a nice summary of the process, but we recommend watching the video for the full effect and some nice close-up shots of the components. It’s also a great way to see how things come apart if you’re interested in doing this yourself.

Valve’s new Steam Deck OLED just went on sale today, but there are goodies for the original LCD model, too — the company is now rolling out a stable build of SteamOS 3.5.5 with a hefty list of fixes, changes, and upgrades.

Some of the biggest are ones we’ve already seen in a September beta, like support for VRR and HDR external displays, the ability to tweak your screen’s color and undervolt your processor with new firmware, and a graphics driver update with a big performance improvement for Starfield (though it still looks like mud in cities).

If you’ve had trouble ordering Valve’s new Steam Deck OLED, you’re not alone. Orders opened at 1PM ET on Thursday, and many people ran into issues actually completing a purchase. Some Verge staffers who tried to purchase a Steam Deck OLED got stuck with the device in their cart but were unable to check out.

As of this writing — more than two hours after orders went live — things seem to be settling down. One Verge employee who had been trying to get one of the new models was finally able to check out. And I’ve seen many people report successful purchases on the Steam Deck subreddit.

On October 5th, we saw the first proof a refreshed Steam Deck was nigh. Now, Valve is officially revealing the $549 and up Steam Deck OLED, which starts shipping on November 16th.

It’s an overhauled version of Valve’s handheld gaming PC but not one that’s focused on performance — the company is sticking with its plan not to produce a faster handheld for the next couple of years.

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.

The latest entry in the renewed transparent gadget craze: your Asus ROG Ally handheld gaming PC. Today, lauded Steam Deck accessory maker Jsaux is taking the wraps off a $40 frosted RGB rear shell for the Asus handheld that lets you see some of its delightful innards.

It might not give you a perfect look through the back, now that I see how much of that frosting blocks the red circuit boards. It also probably won’t enhance your cooling like the company’s Steam Deck backplate, but that frosted surface should bathe nicely in RGB light, not to mention the five light-catching stickers you can place inside.

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.

Western Digital is launching its new SN770M NVMe SSD, designed specifically for devices like the Steam Deck and ROG Ally. The small M.2 2230 form factor drives will be available in 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB options, allowing handheld gamers to significantly upgrade their storage.

Replacing the SSD inside a Steam Deck has always been relatively easy work, but finding M.2 2230 drives hasn’t always been quite as easy. These smaller drives aren’t typically sold to consumers and are usually found inside Dell and Microsoft Surface laptops instead. That situation is starting to improve, though. Sabrent, Micron, Corsair, and others sell M.2 2230 drives, and Framework even started selling its own 2TB upgrade drive earlier this year.