Two new Xbox handhelds are coming later this year
Xbox has finally announced its gaming handhelds, and if you haven’t been following the leaks prior to their announcement, you might be a little bit surprised by them.
During the Xbox Games Showcase 2025, Microsoft announced two new gaming handhelds in partnership with Asus: The ROG Xbox Ally, and the ROG Xbox Ally X. These are essentially rebranded and tweaked versions of the successor to the Asus ROG Ally handheld, with the two SKUs representing a lower-powered and a higher-powered option, respectively.
Both devices feature a 7-inch 1080p IPS screen, capable of refresh rates up to 120hz, as well as AMD Ryzen Z2 processors. The ROG Xbox Ally features the AMD Ryzen Z2 A processor, while the ROG Xbox Ally X features the more powerful Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme processor and 24GB of RAM, up from 16GB on the base model.
Here are the full specs of each, courtesy of Microsoft:
Microsoft says it’s made some tweaks to Windows 11 to make it more suitable for gaming handhelds, including a redesigned Xbox Game Bar, library aggregation within the Xbox app, and a gaming mode that minimize background activity to give games as many resources as possible. This will come as a welcome announcement for PC gamers, especially those on handheld devices like the ROG Ally or Lenovo Legion Go, who have felt that Windows’ overhead has been a little bit damaging to performance in recent years. There’s no word on if these enhancements will come to Windows 11 on other devices, but many are undoubtedly crossing their fingers that they do.
It's also worth noting that these handhelds, despite their naming, won't be able to play Xbox console games natively — anything that's available on Windows will be playable natively to some degree, but games that aren't, including all backwards compatible games, will need to be streamed from a console or the cloud.
No specific release date has been announced for the devices yet, but Microsoft says they’ll be coming to “select markets” including the US, Canada, UK, and Australia this holiday season, with availability in other markets coming in the future. Pricing has also not yet been announced, with Microsoft saying those details are on the way “in the coming months.” You should probably expect them to be quite pricey, though.