What number of Steam Deck-style PC gaming handhelds is simply too many? We nonetheless don’t know as a result of there are lots nonetheless to come back, apparently.
The Zotac Zone seems to be mighty acquainted from the surface, but it surely’s bringing just a few options that may flip heads on this extremely aggressive market phase — like an AMOLED display screen, no improve required.
The Zone’s show isn’t any larger than the competitors at 7 inches, however it’s a bit sharper than regular with its 1080p decision and 120Hz refresh price. The OLED panel is the spotlight, although, providing extra vivid colours and excellent distinction alongside 800 nits of brightness. (The Steam Deck is available in an OLED mannequin, however solely at the costliest tier.)
There are a few different facets to the Zone’s design that may be of curiosity, and which weren’t apparent on the Zone’s preview at Computex, although at this level it seems like all of those handhelds are remixing the identical parts. For instance, the Zone has a really comparable management scheme to the Steam Deck, together with the front-mounted twin touchpads which can be omitted on gadgets just like the ROG Ally.
However it does have one in all my favourite design parts of any handheld gadget: a built-in, wide-hinged kickstand a la the Change OLED. There’s an RGB lighting strip across the again, too, as a result of I suppose you possibly can’t construct one in all these with out injecting some bling.
Zotac additionally determined to go along with a “clicky” D-pad — particularly good for combating recreation followers — and the triggers and thumbsticks are Corridor impact, no have to improve them to keep away from stick drift. They’re surrounded by radial dials for a bit of extra fine-grained management for issues like quantity and brightness. The triggers will be swapped between clicky or lengthy journey, just like the Xbox Elite controller.
Inside, the specs are a bit of disappointing. The Zone is powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 8840U, one of many newer APU chips available on the market, but it surely’s paired to 16GB of RAM and simply 512GB of storage. The spec sheet says that’s an M.2 2280 drive, so it may very well be upgraded with the identical Gen4 drives you possibly can decide up on a budget to your desktop. The RAM isn’t really easy to improve, and together with the fairly ho-hum 48.5 watt-hour battery, it’s lagging behind newer designs just like the ROG Ally X.
Formally revealed again at Computex, the Zotac Zone is getting its social debut at Gamescom in Germany with an apparently closing design. There’s no official phrase on a closing launch date or value, however “September” and “round $800” appear to be the rumors.