Asus Ally is cool, but is AMD's Ryzen Z1 the silicon PlayStation was waiting for?

Another week, another over-powered portable gaming device hits the news, this time from ASUS and its ROG brand. The Ally is getting a full announce on May 11th, rumoured at around $500-$700 price points, running proper Windows 11. 

UPDATE: The UK price is now listed as £699 at Currys, (£632 on Amazon UK) releasing on the 13th June, which is rather scary, and makes the likely PlayStation Project Q seem rather affordable! 

The Ally claims to be eight times faster than a Switch, and twice as fast as a Steam deck when running at its max 30watt performance. Nice if you need the power, but Ally isn't in competition with the Switch and Steam Deck owners are probably pretty happy where they are, so who is the audience? 

More importantly, the Ally's AMD horsepower is noteworthy in a "this is the what the Vita (if it had been commercially successful) could be now" kind of way. Or, perhaps Sony has been waiting for suitable silicon (beyond the Vita's ARM Cortex-A9 CPU and PowerVR GPU heritage) before considering its next portable move?

Running Windows, Ally should be fine to play Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Remote Play and Game Pass, along with Steam , Blizzard and other native platform titles at full whack. The full specs and pricing will be unveiled at an event on 11th May, but some early hands-on looks are live now. 

The known hardware specs are impressive, with a snappy looking 1080p 120hz OLED 7-inch screen taking pride of place. Inside the well-vented case are the-future-of-portable-gaming's AMD's Ryzen Z1 and Z1 Extreme chips (claimed to run at up to 8 TF max) with WiFi 6E for blazing remote play and networking. 

There is naturally plenty of storage, with up to 16GB LPDDR5 dual-channel RAM and 12GB PCIe Gen 4 storage, if you can handle the ever-rising price for the inevitable Max or Pro model (or whatever they call it). 

All of which is interesting, likely expensive and a bit redundant if the Steam Deck plays most games well or very well already for a lot less money. However, it could help set the landscape if Sony does get its finger out and do something cool with the rumoured Q-Lite concept. 

The silly LED lights around the controllers would annoy the hell out of me, they are customisable, and hopefully there's an off switch. Anyway, imagine that beating heart in a PlayStation product running smaller God of War, Assassin's Creed and Horizon off-shoot adventures that don't need five years of development time, while remote playing the full-fat titles and all the PlayStation retro we could ever need. Just a thought.