It’s official. The ROG Ally is coming soon to India. Launched globally on June 13 at a price of $700, the Ally is Asus’s Steam Deck rival handheld console, designed for graphics intensive AAA gaming both locally and over the cloud. It is powered by an AMD chip and runs Windows 11 right out of the gate.
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With the Steam Deck officially unavailable in India, the ROG Ally should go virtually uncontested in the world’s fastest growing mobile market. Even the Nintendo Switch, possibly the most popular handheld in the world at the time of writing, isn’t officially available in the country. And so, Asus is in a way challenging the status quo by launching the ROG Ally in India.
While its hardware is top-notch on paper (you can also hook the handheld to the company’s XG Mobile external GPUs for what is being billed as “high-fidelity 4K gaming”.) it would be interesting to see how Asus prices the console in India. The Switch can be purchased through third-party sellers for as low as Rs 30,000. The ROG Ally costs nearly double if one goes for a direct conversion with the console’s US pricing. The specs and features are more powerful, surely, to justify the bump in price but only time will tell how things pan out.
ROG Ally: power and portability in one package
The ROG Ally has a 7-inch 1080p IPS display with a 120Hz refresh rate and 7ms response time. The panel can peak 500nits. FreeSync is available. You also get Gorilla Glass Victus protection.
Under the hood, the Ally packs AMD’s 4nm Ryzen Z1 Extreme processor which is based on its Zen 4 architecture and comes with 8 cores (16 threads). This can go up to 5.10GHz (up to 30W TDP). A more standard 6-core Z1 configuration is also available. This is paired to an AMD Radeon RDNA3 GPU (4GB) and 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM. Storage tops out at 512GB M.2 NVME Gen4 SSD which is further expandable through micro-SD.
The ROG Ally runs Windows 11 while hallmark Asus apps like Armoury Crate help curate and play games in one place. Asus has also partnered with Microsoft to offer ROG Ally users 3 months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate tier subscription for free in select markets.
Connectivity options include Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2, USB Type-C (Gen 3.2), and 3.5mm audio jack.
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Powering the Ally is a 40Wh battery which is claimed to offer up to 2 hours of “heavy gaming” and up to 6.8 hours of video playback. Fast charging support can top the handheld from 0-50 percent in 30 minutes, Asus claims.
