During the Xbox Games Showcase 2025, Microsoft and ASUS finally unveiled their joint Xbox handheld projects: the ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X. However, neither of the handhelds is equipped with an OLED screen, much to the chagrin of those who’d love the infinite contrast provided by the cutting-edge displays.
Why, though? Well, ASUS Senior Manager of Marketing Content for Gaming Whitson Gordon explained that clearly in a recent stream: essentially, it has to do with drawing more power when coupled with variable refresh rate, a tradeoff the company wasn’t willing to make.
We’ve gone hard on OLED with our desktop monitors. It is no secret that we love OLED at ROG, right? But on the Ally, the calculus is different. We talked about this in more detail last year in our Q&A and so I won’t go quite as deep today, but we’re in a similar boat. We did look at OLED again this year. We did some R&D and prototyping with OLED, but it’s still not where we want it to be when you factor VRR into the mix and we aren’t willing to give up VRR. I’ll draw that line in the sand right now. I am of the opinion that if a display doesn’t have variable refresh rate, it’s not a gaming display in the year 2025 as far as I’m concerned, right? That’s a must-have feature, and OLED with VRR right now draws significantly more power than the LCD that we’re currently using on the Ally and it costs more.
When we look at what people are buying in the handheld market right now, both in terms of the sales of our devices and what we see from competitors, it’s pretty clear what price bands people are willing to buy a device like this in, because remember, it’s a secondary device for a lot of people. It’s not their primary device. I see a lot of people in feedback saying that they want this exact thing. They say, “I don’t want to pay an arm and a leg for this.” Well, yeah, we don’t want that
either. That’s why we’re trying to avoid having it cost an arm and a leg by not putting things in that the vast majority of users don’t need. We’re trying to hit a reasonable price point on these.
That’s all I’ll say about price. You have to align your expectations with the market and what we’re doing here. Adding 32GB, OLED, Z2 Extreme, and all of those extra bells and whistles would cost a lot more than the price bracket you guys are used to on the Ally, and the vast majority of users are not willing to pay that kind of price.
When it comes to specifications, the display is identical between the ROG Xbox Ally and the ROG Xbox Ally X: a 7-inch FullHD IPS screen with a 120Hz refresh rate and AMD FreeSync Premium. However, the ROG Xbox Ally X has more storage (1TB versus 512GB), more RAM (24 vs 16GB), a more powerful processor (the Ryzen Z2 Extreme vs the Ryzen Z2), and the impulse triggers for controls. The pricing of each model hasn’t been revealed yet, but we do know that ASUS is planning to launch both handhelds this holiday, so more details are forthcoming.
