Zotac’s $799 Steam Deck rival has one big advantage over the ROG Ally X

Zotac has officially launched the Zone gaming handheld, which is up for pre-order now, and it carries with it a design feature that gives it an advantage over other Windows-based handhelds.

Getting a new gaming handheld is already a battle between brands. The Steam Deck leads the charge with an incredibly competitively priced product, while other options like the slew of devices from Ayaneo, the ROG Ally X, and Lenovo Legion Go all compete for a slice of the pie.

Zotac’s Zone gaming handheld was announced months ago. Now the company revealed that the Ryzen 8840U-based handheld will be priced at $799, have a 7-inch, 120Hz AMOLED screen and 16GB of LPDDRX memory, as well as base storage of 512 GB, expandable via a MicroSD slot.

Zotac

It all seems like the Zotac Zone has pretty much everything you would want out of a handheld, as well as something only the Steam Deck has done right: twinned trackpads beneath each analog stick.

The display and trackpads are what set the Zotac Zone apart from its closest rival, the ROG Ally X. The only other handheld that’s not named Steam Deck that has trackpads is Ayaneo’s Next 2, which was announced two years ago, but has yet to materialize.

While both sport similar specs, no brand has yet used AMD’s Strix Point APU in a handheld, which could offer a huge boost in performance over the 8840U, 7840U, and Z1 Extreme chipsets found in most other handhelds.

Zotac

The upcoming handheld is set to be shown by Zotac at Gamescom 2024, with pre-orders for the device available now. However, despite being launched, there have been no independent reviews of the system published as of the time of writing.

So, if you’re interested in picking one up, it may be best to wait to see if Zotac has managed to implement its best selling points: The trackpad and the AMOLED display.