Lenovo
- Lenovo is rumored to be developing a portable gaming handheld called the Legion Go, joining the booming market for handheld gaming devices.
- The Legion Go will reportedly have a larger 8-inch display compared to competitors like the Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally, potentially setting it apart in the market.
- While unconfirmed by Lenovo, the Legion Go is expected to use AMD’s new Phoenix processors and run on Windows OS, which may increase its compatibility with games.
Lenovo looks like it might be the latest hardware player looking to get in on a booming market for portable PC gaming hardware, as a Windows Central report indicates it’s working on a handheld of its own.
After the roaring success of the Steam Deck and the well-received likes of the Asus ROG Ally following it up, there’s clearly still space in the market for more excellent portable gaming PCs.
Lenovo is apparently looking to fill up more of that gap with the Legion Go, which will be pretty similar to those devices on the surface, centred around a reported 8-inch display.
Like Asus’ device, the Go will seemingly be based around Windows as its OS, something that we found a bit of a fiddly annoyance in our ROG Ally testing, but also something that widens out its compatibility with games pretty massively.
This is all unconfirmed by Lenovo as yet, but Windows Central reports that the Legion Go will use AMD as its chipset, focussing on its new Phoenix processors, which have so far been marketed more towards ultrabooks.
That 8-inch display is a little bigger than either the Steam Deck or ROG Ally offer, which make for an immediate point of difference, but we don’t know anything about the design or layout of the device beyond this.
There are some safe presumptions to be made around its button layout and the likelihood of twin sticks, but plenty of unknowns remain, including whether it’ll do anything to copy the Steam Deck’s trackpads.
The Legion Go is also an interesting move from Lenovo (provided it turns out to be real) given that it has already seemingly aborted one entry into the portable market.
It was seemingly all set to create a cloud streaming handheld called the Legion Play before deciding against it – a lower-powered device that could stream from the cloud, like the Logitech G Cloud or others.
Perhaps the boom powered by the Steam Deck is simply proving to have a bit more substance to it in terms of sales and interest, which would explain why the Legion Go might survive where the Legion Play couldn’t.