BrutalGamer Bringing you Brutally Honest feedback from today's entertainment industry.
After years of speculation, Microsoft has revealed that there’s a portable Xbox on the horizon, and it’s coming to retail this Holiday Season.
On the road-box
Say whatever you like about the Nintendo Switch, but it changed the game (pun intended) for hardware. Offering a console that could hookup to your home TV, but was also designed to be played on the road, the Switch was a landmark. Not only did the hardware’s success spawn a just-launched sequel console, but also a whole industry of mainstream portable PC’s. Xbox even got in on the act, albeit with a streaming handheld.
Sunday’s Xbox showcase unveiled a partnership with hardware company ASUS and the ROG line though, that’ll be changing that status. You might know the ROG Ally series of handhelds as being PC based, but the lineup will soon incorporate the Xbox name, and in much more than a superficial way. Meet the ROG Xbox Ally.
Looking like it’s set to offer a true portable Xbox experience, the ROG Xbox Ally will allow players to download their digital Xbox games, play via the cloud, and of course stream from their console. It’s also described as combing “the power of Xbox with the freedom of Windows 11”, so you’ll also be able to fire up some Windows PC games.
To that end, the console can seemingly swap between apps on the fly, for the best of both worlds. The ROG Xbox Ally will be shipping in two editions as well, with the standard (in white) and the “X” model, so it’s kind of following along with the current line of Xbox consoles in that way.
Xbox YouTube page
- ROG Xbox Ally: powered by the AMD Ryzen™ Z2 A Processor – balancing performance and power consumption to maximize battery life without sacrificing gameplay quality – 16GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD storage.
- ROG Xbox Ally X: features the AMD Ryzen™ AI Z2 Extreme processor – allowing us to bring new experiences to life including greater frames-per-second, sharp visuals and increased intelligence – double the storage to have more native games at your fingertips, and 24GB of high-speed RAM and 1TB of SSD storage.
There’s no release date just yet for the ROG Xbox Ally, but Microsoft says that you’ll be able to expect to see it launch in time for this coming Holiday Season.
