After teasing it had an announcement in the works, ASUS ROG has sort of revealed it’s next ROG Ally gaming handheld, which is not yet a full follow-up but an evolution of the original, dubbed the ROG Ally X.
The ROG Ally X will be similar to its predecessor in many ways with the same 7″ 120Hz VRR display powered by the AMD Z1 Extreme chipset, but it will improve in areas that I think will matter more to most people, namely a sizeable increase to battery capacity. According to reporting from The Verge, ASUS has suggested it could result in a playtime of three hours or more in system-intensive games, which is a nice step up from the 1-2 hours you’ll get from the current model.
The promotional teaser that the ROG Global YouTube team debuted alongside the announce shows that the “X” in the name refers to an ethos of “Extra, Extend, Expand” and the chat from the team following suggests that the “Expand” part of the equation includes more storage, more RAM and more external ports, but we’ll know more come July 2nd when it’s revealed in full.
Along with new hardware, there will also be an improved 1.5 version of Armoury Crate SE which will ship with the Ally X and includes a “fairly big” UI overhaul and new features, and which naturally still come to the original Ally as ROG promises it’s still supporting the current model for the foreseeable future. You can see some of it in action in the video below:
In our review of the original ROG Ally, which only launched last year, we said, “The ASUS ROG Ally feels like a genuine step forward in the handheld space. It has a glorious 1080p/120hz display, runs all PC games extremely consistently and for the most part behaves exactly as expected. Some minor glitches and the battery life are the only thing that can still be improved upon.”
