Several companies joked about the announcement of “new products” last Saturday (April 1). On this day, Asus decided to do something different and announced a new device on April Fools’ Day. Due to the scenario, many thought that the revelation of the South Korean manufacturer of computer parts was a joke, but in fact it was a real launch, which even had the objective of competing with Steam Deck, another product of the same category (portable consoles aimed at playing titles developed for PC).
If you check out the video of the new product announced last Saturday, there is certainly a joking tone about the new product, but that was done intentionally. However, today the official ROG Twitter profile revealed that the ROG Ally was not an April Fool’s joke.
It’s real!
Stay tuned for more ????
Want to know when pre-orders start?
????https://t.co/ljc2GNN0UU#ROG #ROGALLY #PlayALLYourGames pic.twitter.com/IG6vDtgTag— ROG Global (@ASUS_ROG) April 3, 2023
What is the Asus ROG Ally?
The Asus ROG Ally is a direct competitor to the Steam Deck. That is, it is a console aimed at PC games. An APU was developed in partnership with AMD for the device, in addition to providing several buttons similar to those found on console controls such as PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X, among others. According to the Dave2D channel on YouTube, the device has a 7″ Full HD screen with 500 nits of brightness, 120Hz refresh rate and 5ms response time.
AMD’s custom APU utilizes a Zen 4 CPU and an RDNA 3 GPU. Additionally, Dave Lee says the Asus ROG Ally will be competitively priced at what the competition (read Steam Deck) charges.
Release and availability
It is not yet known when pre-orders for the Asus ROG Ally will start. The only thing that was made available by the company was a link to the BestBuy website for those interested to provide an email to receive the next information about the product.