Asus ROG Ally X official, will bring some significant upgrades to handheld gaming

Asus isn't hanging around – perhaps reading the room and seeing the number of rumours and leaks that were starting to circulate, it's bitten the bullet and announced the next version of its ROG Ally PC gaming handheld.

The Asus ROG Ally X will be fully unveiled and launched at a special event on 2 June this year, as explained on the latest edition of Asus' short new show on YouTube. However, we already know a large chunk of the important areas that it's improving on thanks to a report from The Verge. 

For one thing, that name is apparently very deliberate – Asus isn't positioning this as the ROG Ally 2, and it'll seemingly be on sale at the same time as the original ROG Ally, just for a higher price.

That extra investment will get you beefed-up specs in some areas, but the ROG Ally X will still use the same AMD Z1 Extreme chipset, and the same 7-inch screen, too. 

One of the biggest upgrades, though, will come in the battery life department, where Asus explained that people can expect a significant boost in playing time depending on the exact situation, although it hasn't yet put that in statistical terms.

The ROG Ally X will apparently also have more than the 16GB of RAM in the base model, and a longer M.2 2280 SSD slot to make storage expansion easier (and therefore cheaper). 

A new joystick design will ensure that these can be much more easily repaired and replaced, which is always welcome, and it seems like the only major downside to all these additions (other than the price going up) will be a heavier unit overall. This will mostly be down to the larger battery inside, something that Asus said it was surprised by people asking for when the original ROG Ally arrived in their hands. 

Since Asus has also been doing a good job of bringing software updates and new features to the ROG Ally since launch, this is looking like a really healthy product line right now – although we'll get a firmer and more detailed insight into this when the ROG Ally X is fully unveiled at the start of June.