So I bought the Xbox Ally X
I was gonna wait for Panther Lake but with the way things are going, the prices might be nuts by the time it comes out and bestbuy was selling this at a discount. So I managed to buy it for $800 USD. It was an open box but it looks brand new and came with everything. The main reason I got this over the others is because it seems to mix everything just well enough compared to some of the others. Like the Lenovo Legion Go 2 has an OLED screen but it's extremely heavy. MSI Claw has the worst software of the bunch and Intels drivers from what I have seen is still not quite there yet, especially for old games which is the primary reason I got this handheld.
So far this thing has been great. It's better than I thought it would be and yea, there's certainly a level of windows jank when installing certain games and yes you do have to spend a few hours initially updating and configuring. But after that, it's pretty smooth sailing. I changed my power settings from sleep to hibernate and that changes the experience a lot. During sleep, it did occasionally spin up the fans for no reason while in hibernate, it really does feel like the Steam Decks suspend and resume function and even works in game. And Windows Desktop I'd say is superior to SteamOS desktop as things like the keyboard has a lot of context awareness. For example when I was signing into rockstar social club and needed to enter verification code, the keyboard automatically had the numpad enabled.
The gaming experience has been far better than any other handheld devices that I have owned thus far. The battery lasts a long time, the speakers is insanely good, the VRR display helps greatly with harder to run games and it's super comfy. Even though the screen is 1080p, I'd consider it more of a 720p handheld if you really want that 60FPS+ at high to max settings with ps4 era games. Emulation experience has also been great with many detecting it as an xbox controller instead of having to remap manually.
So overall, I am happy with my purchase. I was pretty disappointed with the Switch 2 as the battery life was horrid and the screen could have been better. So this feels like the perfect handheld but granted much more expensive.
PC Specs: CPU: 7800X3D || GPU: Strix 4090 || RAM: 32GB DDR5 6000 || Main SSD: WD 2TB SN850
