Well, this was certainly an interesting way to announce a new product. On April Fools’ Day, ASUS released a video trailer for ROG ALLY (you can watch it below), its first handheld gaming console and clearly a competitor to the Steam Deck. But it was April Fools’ Day, and it could have been an elaborate joke. However, ASUS did try to play it off as a joke, as its Head of Product Management, Shawn Yen, posted it on LinkedIn with “Happy April Fools. ROG Ally (A-lie).”
But now that we are a couple of days removed from April Fools’ Day, turns out the ASUS ROG ALLY is real and it’s not a joke. Wait, what? Which company would seriously announce a new product on April 1st, pretend it’s a joke, and then reveal that it’s not? ASUS, that’s who.
Earlier this morning, ROG North America released a tweet confirming the ROG ALLY is real and that it is coming. Turns out Best Buy wasn’t part of the ruse at all and its landing page for the device is serious. To further prove it’s real, YouTuber Dave2D has posted up an extensive video taking a look at the Steam Deck competitor, confirming it uses a custom AMD SoC built on TSMC’s 4nm process node. Inside, there is a Zen 4 CPU and an RDNA 3 GPU, making it very up-to-date in terms of hardware.
Unlike the Steam Deck, the ROG ALLY has a seven-inch, 1080p 16:9 display at up to 120Hz. As of now, it runs on Windows 11, so it will be interesting to see how performance is compared to the Deck’s Linux SteamOS.
Depending on the price, the ROG ALLY might be a real winner, considering the Steam Deck’s popularity. In fact, the better hardware might even convince some Steam Deck owners to purchase an ALLY too. Hopefully the gaming experience on the ALLY is better than its reveal.
Recent Updates
April 3, 2023: Linus Tech Tips has posted a video of its first impressions of the ROG ALLY, which we’ve added to the bottom of this post.
