- Windows as the key interface
- very poor battery life (even worse than the Deck!)
- no trackpads so this limits what you can ever play with it to games made for gamepads
- none of the SteamOS goodness
That being said, I think the Ally has great potential and some of the problems listed can be solved/mitigated;
> - Windows as the key interface
You can boot straight into Steam Big Picture. It will show you the desktop for a second, for now, but surely there will be solutions to make it boot almost instantaneously. And then Windows remains as your Desktop Mode.
> - very poor battery life (even worse than the Deck!)
There's a tool called Handheld Companion (FOSS) that tries to do a lot of what the right hand side menu in SteamOS does, FPS limits, power control, etc. It has a feature called AutoTDP which basically modulates power to target a certain FPS average, and it works surprisingly well, shaving off enough power to make the SD and the Ally battery comparable in situations over 9W. Below 9W I agree, the ROG Ally chip just eats more power for sometimes lower performance. It even emulates a DualShock 4 controller so you can stream PS4/PS5 games to it via Sony's app. (that also enables gyro in Steam games, which Asus didn't care much to add, even though the hardware is there)
> - no trackpads so this limits what you can ever play with it to games made for gamepads
Nothing that can be done about that, except maybe yet another Handheld Companion tweak which adds virtual gamepads on the edges of the touchscreen. Very customizable, not perfect, hard to reach with smaller hands, but hey, it's an option.
> - none of the SteamOS goodness See Handheld Companion above
PS: how do I add quotes in here?
And I read that the button can stuck and it can get hot.
The problem specific to the Ally right now is that it seems to get too hot where the SD card reader is, causing SD cards to fry for some users: https://www.dexerto.com/tech/asus-rog-ally-has-a-bizarre-ove... . I'm sure this will be fixed in a future hardware revision, but for now it seems worth waiting on the Ally for them to hammer out the first-generation kinks.
Still, I'm happy that the Ally exists, both as competition for Valve and to help prove that this PC form factor has legs.
And for anyone comparing the options… go upthread and read how many people are saying this is _the_ killer feature of the Steam Deck. Because it is.
I’d been kind of on the fence how I felt about the ROG, but that makes it a solid “no” for me.
I have myself barely scratched the surface of the steam input features, but there is nothing that I have been unable to do with it. And that is so important when you are emulating games.
Personally I like the Ally's gamepad a bit more. The Steam Deck makes the buttons just a bit too small to make room for the trackpads. When I compared them they were about the same size as a Joycon's buttons.