The same thing that makes Windows gaming handhelds desirable also holds them back. 

It’s never been the hardware. The designs aren’t perfect in a lot of the devices — even the best of the lot, the Asus ROG Ally and ROG Ally X, which are the basis of the forthcoming ROG Xbox Ally — but they’re generally playable.

The culprit has always been Windows. It simply isn’t an operating system designed for a dedicated gaming handheld, and that needs to change. 

Of course, we’d all love the Xbox Ally to be cheap, somewhere in the range of the Nintendo Switch 2‘s $450. But while we don’t yet know the real pricing, $600-plus seems more likely given the specs. With the exception of the processor, which is designed with handhelds in mind, the specs are the same as what you may find in a full Windows laptop.

I can’t vouch for the lower-end model of the Ally — I’ve only tested the higher-end one — but on the last-gen hardware, many games run well, at least at 1080p, and people have been known to output as high as 4K with an optional docking station.

But Windows has a lot more to overcome. 

Windows annoyances, writ small

There are a lot of chunks of the operating system that serve as a useful base — many of which it shares with the Xbox — and which make it possible to run games from any game store on Windows, one of the big reasons we want the handheld. Those parts also make connections to peripherals and communications possible, as well as supply an architecture for incorporating AI (where it makes sense) for games. 

But layered atop that scaffolding are the millions of lines of code (if not more) necessary for an OS that tries to be all things to all people, along with an interface intended to serve a multiplicity of uses. It can make just getting to play a game a misery. Microsoft has the opportunity — really the necessity — to strip Windows down to its gaming essentials in order to make the Xbox Ally the gaming handheld people want to love.

Things need to change for gaming handhelds, and many of those things would make Windows an operating system we could hate a little less.

• Windows Update: Frequent updates have become a fact of life, and gaming devices are no exception. And if an update brings gaming-related bug fixes or feature enhancements, that’s fine. But when I’m ready to game and have to sit through 10 minutes (or more) of updates for parts of the OS that have nothing to do with gaming, I get pissed. You can postpone for a while, but at a certain point, it gets angry and things begin to stop working. Then there are times when updates insist on happening even though you’ve postponed it. As I write this, I’ve gotten a pop-up notification on the Ally X that it needs to restart, and the update is estimated to take 30 minutes. «NO. THANK. YOU.»
• Windows sign-on: By default, Windows 11 forces you to sign in to a Microsoft account; that’s an annoying but common practice on a lot of devices, including consoles. But it should be much easier to do on a handheld, such as with a barcode scanned by a phone, the way you can log in to Steam, as well as an easy way to tell it to bypass authentication if you don’t need it. The on-screen keyboard isn’t bad, and a PIN code can be short, but it’s still a pain and not accessibility friendly. Face ID doesn’t work for these, and adding an IR camera on the long edge for Windows Hello would elevate what’s already a high price. I could go on, but I’ll spare you the rant I reexperience for every system I test.
• Windows desktop: On a gaming-only device, you should never, ever have to see the Windows desktop unless you choose to, the same way you can use a Steam Deck (or SteamOS handheld like the Lenovo Legion Go S) without ever having to know the Linux desktop even exists. Every one of these I’ve used has, at best, an app to consolidate the game launchers and some other game-related perks. But they’re rarely persistent enough, and you always end up in the standard Windows interface at some point. Imagine you’ve only used Macs and are confronted by this experience. Yuck. The interface for a handheld like the Xbox Ally has to be more than skin deep — a lot more. 
• Crapware: I have a fairly broad definition of crapware: Anything installed that I didn’t ask for and that’s not essential to a device’s operation. Seriously, Microsoft — the standard trial versions of Microsoft Office, Teams, LinkedIn, and more are an even bigger waste of space on a gaming handheld than on a laptop. Games are huge, storage tends to be too small for cost reasons, and every byte of storage should be dedicated to things required to play them.
• Controller navigation throughout: On a screen so small, touch alone doesn’t cut it for an operating system and applications designed for use with a mouse, and it can throw you out of the gaming experience.
• HDR: You shouldn’t have to remember to go to the display settings and turn HDR on; it should be able to autodetect it when you turn it on within a game. You generally can’t leave HDR enabled on screens this dim — usually only as high as 500 nits — without messing up the display of the non-HDR elements. But as far as I can tell, the only Windows handheld with HDR is the OLED Zotac Zone.

And those are just the things that stand out in my memory. There are a lot of places that could use some interface streamlining as well, like Wi-Fi (have you ever tried to find your own network listed when you live in an apartment building with at least 50 different SSIDs within range?).

And most of these would significantly improve the experience for PC Windows users as well.