Everything wants to be X now like it’s late 90s. X wouldn’t give it to ya if your naming convention is too confusing.

“We’re not looking at 30 to 40 percent more capacity,” he tells me. “We’re looking at way more than that.”

If you’re not improving efficiency then you’re just making the device bigger and heavier. If you’re going that route, the smart thing would probably be a detachable external battery.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The Asus ROG Ally was the first true Steam Deck challenger; while I’d argue it fell a little short, it legitimately improved the state of affordable Windows handheld gaming with its plugged-in performance boosts and smooth variable refresh rate screen.

Battery isn’t the only change Asus is talking about today; the Ally X is about addressing many of the community’s top priorities for how to revise the original.

“We think about battery and storage, graphics and memory, ports… our goal is to fit as many of those as possible into a device like this,” says Asus senior product manager Gabriel Meng.

As far as a ROG Ally 2 goes, Asus agrees that it has a similar philosophy to Valve: it wants to build a true successor when it can offer a significant performance boost, not just an incremental one.

And while Asus doesn’t plan to sell an aftermarket battery upgrade for original Ally buyers it has a big software update coming for those buyers as well: Armory Crate SE 1.5 is not only a very fresh coat of paint and navigation improvements — it’ll finally let players share their button mappings for various games with other Ally owners.

While Meng says, “We are very open-minded to looking at other solutions,” and that the company does have conversations with Valve, Asus says it has philosophical and logistical reasons to stick with Microsoft’s OS, including a desire to have the “inclusiveness of all different game platforms” instead of relying on Steam.

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