Every New Handheld From Computex 2026 | Handheld Showdown

This is going to be a very chaotic episode. Go on, have a guess. AI plus. It's there. There you go. I knew there was AI in there. This is the moment where PC gaming handhelds can finally do the thing that the Nintendo Switch 2 does so well. Welcome to a very special episode of Handheld Showdown. We're coming to you from Computex in Taipei, our favorite tech event of the year, where we get our first look at some of the coolest upcoming gaming hardware releases, and this year did not disappoint. Today, I'm joined with the Jason England. Hi. It's been a very exciting time at Computex for gaming handhelds. Everything over the past couple of years, it's felt very much like, oh, it's a 5% increase in frame rates. It's a 10% increase here and there. Maybe a little smidgen of additional power efficiency and stuff like that, whereas now it feels like a big leap forward. So we've gone hands-on with all these brand new handheld devices. We're going to share the ones that we're most excited for, which ones we think are going to be the biggest of the year, the most expensive of the year, and which ones have us questioning, should this even be released? Despite the fact that we have been reviewing these for several years now, we're seeing things that are so new that we're actually excited to revisit these devices. And the main news has been Intel Arc G3, frankly, bringing the next generation to handheld gaming in something like this, the MSI Claw 8EX AI+, which I've not been able to put down the entire time I've had it. We got it the other night. We unboxed it in my hotel room. This is like 11 p.m. It's his birthday, by the way, right? It's 11 p.m. He's like, can we please unbox it today? Cause I want to play some games. And normally I'd be like, dude, go away. I want to go to bed. I've been up since five in the morning, but you know what? I'm nice. It's his birthday. We unbox it. But he, like he said, has not been able to put it down since. And that's really kind of like the theme of like this event. So, you know which handheld I actually found most surprising that we saw? Which one was that? It was the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally X 20. There's been 19 other ROG Xbox Ally Xs. It's actually like, you know, it's for their special 20th anniversary of the ROG brand. And it actually does bring some pretty cool updates. I'm not going to say upgrades really. It feels like the Xbox Ally XS. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's more quality of life stuff. You've got the new OLED display in there. You've got the D-pad that can either be four-way or eight-way just by rotating it. And then it's also fully translucent. So as somebody who likes transparent tech, I'm a bit of a nerd like that. Just to get to see all the heat pipes and everything running in the back of it is pretty sick with the gold accent. So when we posted our first hands on, a lot of you were very excited about the new device, especially with the green Xbox button. But you know what a lot of people said? It's like, why wasn't this the original Xbox Ally X? A lot of people also said, hey, I just picked one up. I regret picking one up now. Had I known that this is what was coming out, I would have waited. It's all very much about quality of life updates with this one. So you've got the improved thermal management inside so you can run it at that top 35 watt TVP for a much more sustained experience. And then on top of that, you've got the rubberized grips. And of course, you've got that familiar ROG Xbox design. So it's one of the more comfortable handhelds as well. I didn't notice the difference until I looked at an older ROG Xbox Ally. It's gone slightly bigger, hasn't it? So from 7 inches to 7.4. So even though the device looks like it's the same size, the bezels are smaller. And that's how they've squeezed in that larger display. And so at first you're not going to really notice or appreciate the extra 0.4 inches. I'm not saying that's not a lot, guys. But what I am saying is that OLED, that OLED is nice. So especially when we were playing it outdoors and comparing it with the LCD screen, I could see what was happening on screen a lot better. Even though the camera wasn't really picking it up as well to my eyes, it was a much more enjoyable experience. Oh, 100%. Like, when you think about, like... These people, like, what? We're recording here. Can everyone not stop what they're doing for us? He perfectly frame holds. I'm not going to hold my frame. He can do what he wants. Oh, 100% agree. In terms of, like, the actual user experience on this, this is one of the more well put together handheld. Previously, like, the two popular handhelds were, like, the ROG Xbox Ally X and the Steam Deck OLED. It's like, oh, I can get the beautiful screen or I can get the better performance and the better grips. And Asus is like, wait, hold the phone. I'll do that. Let me just bring OLED to it, right? Yes. And in terms of, like, looking at the whole lineup of what we saw here at Computex, it definitely has the best display in terms of having that OLED there, in terms of the flash flood of color that you're just smacked in the face with. But also, a lot of people were very curious about coming bundled with AR glasses. Yes. That would be the Asus ROG X-Reel R1 AR glasses. So these are essentially other gaming glasses. I've been testing them for a little bit. I've actually brought them on the flight with me over to Taipei here. Think like the X-Reel One Pro glasses, but more gamer-y. And you can tell that from the aesthetic where whenever I'm wearing them, I'm looking like I'm about to offer people if they want to take the blue pill or the red pill. It's a look we're all going for. Oh, yes. 2001 is so back. Asus promotes the OLED display, the ROG Nebula HDR display, and it's a gorgeous display from what I've been looking at. But then they put glasses in there as well. So like, what are we talking about here? And their main selling point, which is kind of confusing to me, the fact that they're bundled in with these, is the fact that it has a 240 hertz refresh rate, which is super exciting, but you need a dock connected by display port into a desktop tower. So you're locked at 120 with these glasses connected to the ROG Ally, unless they've got some magical thunderbolt connectivity that I don't know about. So I get the appeal of like, okay, I'm using this handheld on the go, and now I'm going from my now 7.4-inch screen to what is it, 100 inches, 200 inches? Yeah, it can go up to like 271 inches. Okay, so a massive screen. So that's really cool. But now if I need to get its full performance, I now need to use a dock. That doesn't sound very portable. No, not particularly, no. And don't get me wrong, like using the glasses on the go, a lot of fun. And being able to play it while also not getting neck pain and stuff like that, while you can just sort of like sit back and just play whatever games you want to on like a massive screen in front of you and turn your tiny seat in economy class into feeling something a bit more premium. Economy seat, but first-class gaming. Exactly, nice, nice. These glasses on their own are $849. So what does that mean alongside $1,000 handheld? So now you're adding on $850 or whatever your glass is, are we looking at a $2,000 console because it's like a special edition and they're marking it up? Or is it going to be, oh, because it's bundled together, it's going to be $1,500? Being blunt, I think it's going to be more. Yeah, they know people want that design, but how many people want that design plus glasses? All of these different, all that machinations, it's like, it's a special edition with an OLED display and a fresh design. That's probably going to up the cost a little bit. They're going to put glasses in with it as well. I think the glasses are a way to cover for what is going to be quite a sharp increase in the price of the memory inside. In my head, I'm thinking, do they have a huge stock of R1 glasses that they're trying to like unload? And they're like, hmm, what if we bundle it with this very popular device? But let me ask you this, if someone recently picked up an ROG Xbox Ally X, should they sell it and upgrade to this? Like, does that make sense? Like, are there enough? No, I don't really agree either, but a lot of you have been asking that question. I know a lot of you are going to probably be making that decision. It is, without a doubt, a better handheld, but, and this is what we're going to get into next, the performance is unchanged. We are still stuck with the AMD Ryzen Z2 AI Extreme, whatever the hell it's called. And I say stuck with, as if it's a bad chip, whereas actually it kind of isn't. It's still a pretty good chip, but as we started getting the rumblings and as we started to find out just that little bit more that it's a new Ally. It's like, what did that mean, new chip? Yeah, given that we've had all of these other handhelds that come with this new Intel chip, which we'll go into in a couple of minutes, surely this thing would have that. Asus is thinking it can go from the ROG Xbox Ally X to the ROG Xbox Ally X20 with an OLED display and probably charge way more because the RAM price has gone up. So then they're going to throw in some AR glasses in there as well. And let's be honest, the Z2 Extreme AI or AI Extreme is five to 10% better than the Z1 Extreme that we saw with the original Xbox Ally, which came out in 2023? Exactly. Okay, which is a handheld I still have because I bought it at a great price. It's still a great size. And as much as I appreciate the upgrades the Xbox Ally X has brought, I still need that performance increase to justify upgrading to another device. It's downgraded my hype from being, this thing could be massive to then when I actually got my hands on with it to a, it's fine. It's fine, it's nice. Like again, all these minor things do add up. The rubberized grips, the better screen, the cooler design, like it feels like a special edition. It's definitely not a new device though. It's a special edition that doesn't really feel that special. Yeah, yeah, I said it. Yeah, he said. Yeah, bring it in. Okay, now hold your hand. But what if you took the ROG Xbox Ally X's best feature, its larger Xbox style controls on the back, combined it with a larger screen and actually upgraded its internals and made meaningful performance upgrades? Well, you get the MSI Claw 8 EX. Go on. AI plus. There, there you go. I knew there was AI in there. This is the device that caught you and I's attention and I think just about everyone else's. For a lot of reasons, I think this is going to be the most exciting handheld of 2026. You can also tell there's been a lot of time put into the crafting of the design of this thing. They were saying they wanted to give you as close of that Xbox traditional controller in a handheld form factor and I think they've come very, very close to that. Yeah, and then there's also the haptics of it. It feels like a PS5 DualSense controller moment for handhelds in terms of like the real sort of like sharp haptic feedback that you can get in it. A similar vibration engine to something that you would find in an iPhone kind of thing. Here's what I think is really interesting. One of the demos we did see is this plugged in and connected to a TV using a wireless Xbox controller and using this as your home console as well. Obviously, this isn't going to be to the level of like a Series X, but with all the improvements of the G3 Extreme. It is an actual generational leap over what we've been used to so far. Pause it. I'm keeping that in. Intel claims a 42% improved frame rate over the Ryzen Z2 AI Extreme and these are running at the same wattages. Probably the most shockingly impressive claim for me. This thing is capable of the same frame rates, the same frames per second of the Ryzen Z2 AI Extreme handhelds at half the power. That to me is the biggest breakthrough that I don't think people are really talking about. They're all going in like, oh, it's got faster frames and everything and that's great. But also... Because one of the main reasons you want to get one of these, right, is to play it on the go. Yeah. Usually when you're playing it on the go, you're playing it on its battery. Yeah, you always have to get like strategic of like whenever you play on your handheld in like 30 minutes here, 30 minutes there. Yeah, exactly. And then like for me, my handheld is not exactly that handheld anymore because the Steam Deck battery is just completely cooked. I got mine in 2022. So I have a big ass battery pack that I carry in my backpack. And one of these silver bullets that Intel uses to get to this point is what they call XCSS3. It's resolution scaling that can use the GPU to render a much lower resolution of the game and then blow it all the way up to the full 1200p. And then there's also multi-frame generation as well, which is the GPU will render two frames and then the AI bit in the middle will just predict three of them. And then that gives you the smoother frame rate and things like that. That's all well and good. But what does that actually mean for gaming on one of these? So for context, when I went to the MSI demo, I got to play three games. I got to play F125. I got to play Battlefield 6. And I got to play Hogwarts Legacy. And we got to like manipulate them in particular ways and stuff. But as you always get with these demos, it's very much like, okay, these are the games we want you to play. Yes. These are the ones that have been optimized, right? Like that's going to be their best case scenario. To kind of give you some frame rates in this realm, Battlefield 6 at 1200p high with XCSS3 resolution scaling set to performance, but with no frame gen, you're looking at around 65 frames per second, which is really impressive. If you go for something a little bit more optimized, so think in F125 on like medium to low settings, you can easily break the 180 frames barrier, which is beyond anything I've ever seen anything in the handheld do. The big question. Right. With this device, right? Sounds good. When are we getting it? How much is it going to cost? MSI told us they're targeting to release this June 23rd, I think. And they said they're targeting $1,500, but where I'm a little bit confused. Have you seen the Best Buy pre-orders open up? I have indeed. I think it was something like $1,700, $1,699. This is the big sort of like pinned to the balloon of hype that we've been seeing around here, which is getting dangerously expensive. We're well into like mid to high end gaming laptop territory right now. They are fully aware of the challenges of Ramageddon, Rampocalypse. You can see that in a lot of device pricing. And also if you go around the show floor and start asking people, oh yeah, how much this thing is it going to cost? Stop asking about it. Okay. We kind of teased to it already, but there is a new player in the handheld scene with Acer. They've been very much like the bridesmaid, never the bride. When it's come to like other companies doing it, it's always been dominated by MSI, Asus, Lenovo. But their comeback tour is back on with the Predator Atlas 8 because they are stuffing Arc G3 and Arc G3 Extreme in here. And also you may look at the spec sheets and see like 24 gigs of RAM. That's a little bit less than the Claw 8 EX-AR Plus. That's the first thing I noticed. Like, so in terms of similarities and differences, it's a little bit more of that more traditional handheld design that we've seen for a while. You don't have like the deeper grooves here. It's more of a uniform body. You also still have the eight inch display, but like you said, only 24 gigabytes of RAM. So do you think that could be problematic or could they use that to their advantage? I believe they could. I mean, let's go through like the ergonomics that you were talking about there, which completely agree with you. Like there's definitely something that feels a little bit nicer about this thing. The buttons here feel quite a bit more tactile, whereas when I was trying the Atlas 8, you kind of feel like the face buttons are a little bit spongier in a way. It does have two-step triggers though, two-stop triggers though, sorry, which you can change from either going like full analog to just being like a simple tap, which is really good in like either going from racing games or shooters and things like that. And as you were saying, there isn't really as much of a hand grip around it compared to the much more pronounced grips on the side of this thing here. None of that may matter because they're putting less RAM in it, which ultimately I don't think that's going to impact performance massively. That's not going to be the bottleneck for most of your games. It's not going to be the biggest bottleneck, no, because the CPU and the GPU are working in tandem really well here. One of the things that you'll hear Intel talking about is this thing, the CPU part of this chip may have performance cores, but almost all of the game's logic and math and telling the GPU what to do will run almost entirely on the efficiency cores because they are good enough to run the games. So it's already a stupidly fast chip and the RAM, there's already enough headroom there to kind of fit a lot of this stuff. But ultimately in terms of like the actual handheld holding in your hand experience, it's not as good as this. But will that matter if it's cheaper? It's middle of the pack. Like it didn't really have anything that stood out to me that made me think like, oh, of all the handhelds that we've seen and tested out that I'm like, oh, this is the one I want to take back to my hotel room and play games on. Yes, the build quality doesn't quite feel like this. It's got the same sort of like variable refresh rate display in it, 8-inch IPS. Acer has the potential to do something very stupid here. Don't we all? Well, almost all points in my life, yes. But they also have the potential to do something very smart here as well. So yeah, I think hopefully the Predator becomes the handheld that people get when they want a good mix of performance and lower cost. But let's say you only have $200, right? I think Acer has come up with a very interesting device and I have a lot of questions for you. Okay. I got to see the Acer Blaze Link and at first I thought, oh, this is kind of their answer to the Logitech G Cloud. This is basically a shell of a device that requires a host PC which runs the games. So you have your powerful gaming laptop or your gaming PC that runs the games and then string it to this device. So it's like the PS portal of PC games. And honestly, given that we have devices like the Logitech G Cloud, given that your iPad, your phone can cloud stream games or you can use Steam Link and play your games from your PC to those devices, I don't know why this device exists. This and something like the PlayStation portal before it got its cloud gaming update were only useful for one key thing, which is playing games while your wife watches Bake Off on the main TV. Shout out to Kim. But the main issue is A, your PC needs to be always on. How? Like I do use Steam Link on my Steam Deck to like play stuff when I'm on the couch and I don't want to walk the five feet to my PC to like sit down and play. And the main difficulty with that is it's such a specific use case that a lot of people just don't have. Streaming your games from a PC is also going to have other issues, right? Like latency. This is a Wi-Fi 6 device. It's not even Wi-Fi 6E, right? So you're very much dependent on a stable internet connection and your proximity to a router. If you are doing this whole like cloud streaming from your PC thing, if you are at home next to your PC or your PS5 or your portal, it's fine. But you know, this whole like use case scenario that they talk about where it's like, oh, so long as you're on a Wi-Fi network anywhere in the world, you can connect to it just fine. That sucks ass. Don't do that. When you were testing it out, I heard that the latency was terrible. No, no, no. It wasn't, okay, by terrible, you mean the game didn't even open. And oh, I'll give it a bit of a pass in that like, you know, we were on the convention for Wi-Fi. But I think maybe just early software, the convention for Wi-Fi, maybe all that mixed together. No, we couldn't even get the game to run at all. But imagine you have this device and that happens to you. You're ready. You just got off work. You just got back from school. You're ready to get into your game. And now you have to do a bunch of troubleshooting. That doesn't seem to me like the seamless experience that they're going after. And again, the thing that still, I can't wrap my head around is like, if we have already had devices like the PS Portal bring dedicated cloud gaming as well there, is this device just not strong enough, powerful enough to allow for local cloud streaming without the reliance of a host device? It's a baffling decision, holding it in your hands wise, in terms of like button pressing and stuff like that, it all felt pretty cheap. Which would again be forgivable if they could hit a good price point. But I wouldn't be surprised if this thing came out and it was at least $150, which at that point, I would highly recommend spending the extra cash and trying to get a used or older ROG Ally. Well, I mean, at that point, that can easily get you six, seven months of GeForce now. So why get the device to do it when you could just get the thing straight away? Okay, so for right now, it feels like Intel has kind of won the gaming handheld Computex show. Yeah, right? This is only the start. G3 Extreme is coming to a lot more devices that we are excited to hopefully test once they do release. But what does that mean largely for the other players, AMD? I know Nvidia has some kind of interesting new release. So let's start with AMD because they have a massive catch-up game to do now. I think it's no secret that we'll get a Z3 Extreme at some point. When? Nothing's been confirmed or anything. And I don't know where it'll come down the line, like give or take a new Deus and a CPU or two. AMD is probably a bit busy with the bit that makes some more money than this. But that's not to say... I thought gaming was their bread and butter. But one of the things that Intel has proven with XeSS3 and multi-frame gen is that backwards compatibility is possible. So I don't know if you knew this, but on the old MSI Core 8 AI Plus and the MSI Core before that with the Intel Core Series 1 in the old one and the Series 2 in this one, they can both do XeSS3 and multi-frame generation now because they've got that model working across all the systems. So it's proven to be possible and older and technically on paper, weaker silicon than what AMD has been making. It's definitely possible on something like the Ryzen Z2 Extreme to get that AI trickery going. You think maybe they're just waiting to make sure they get it right. Exactly. They would be daft to not do so given the fact that Intel is about to drink all of AMD's milkshake right now. But in more exciting news... Yeah, let's get to the exciting stuff. So let's talk about like the super high prices of like what that could get you. And that's where NVIDIA's RTX Spark chip comes in. Obviously at the moment, it's just talking about laptops and their main focus is to reinvent the PC. But there's that little line in their press release and in my time testing it, that shows it has the same graphical capability as an RTX 5070 while also running way lower wattages. So would this be something similar to when Apple first introduced the M-series chips? Yes, this is their Apple silicon moment in terms of bringing max power with impressive power efficiency to kind of balance them out as well into one ARM chip. That immediately got me thinking about handheld gaming because this isn't NVIDIA's first rodeo to this. It shows that they have that capability because it's like in the Nintendo Switch, it is an ARM chip with an NVIDIA GPU on it. Now NVIDIA's got their own thing that has a frankly monstrous graphics card on it. What would be the possibility of seeing something like that in a handheld? The answer came down to like three key things. One, their focus at the moment is on reinventing the PC and doing all of their agentic AI stuff, however you feel about that. Number two is all of the ARM compatibility things that they have to work through at the moment. So Qualcomm's been having this problem with like the Snapdragon X Elite laptops where they have an emulation layer that can run apps that are built for like Intel and AMD chips. It can run it just fine. It just makes that laptop way less power efficient and NVIDIA is going to face those same problems with games. They do run super smooth. I don't know what it does for battery life and then also more importantly on top of that is the anti-cheat stuff. So talking about BattlEye and things like that. I'm actually going to be able to play my competitive games on this new device. Exactly. NVIDIA did confirm they've got them all working and then number three is their very open-ended call to action saying if somebody wants to work on one, we'll work with them. Now, do I think there's going to be an MSI Claw RTX Spark? No, because it's going to be $5,000. Do I think that smaller companies like think like a One X player? Yeah, we did see one of them. Decides to do the crazy thing? Yeah. And put that chip in there? That's where my mind was going. I'd say there's a strong possibility of that. That's probably a good place to leave it because we have probably seen one of the most exciting years in handhelds. Not just in the handhelds that we are hand-holding right now. We know that there is a lot more in the tank. Yeah. Right? I think that's a good way to put it. Exactly. And again, that's why we are super excited by this year's Computex and this year's handheld releases. But we want to know what you guys think. What handheld are you most excited to get your hands on? And maybe more importantly, how much are you actually willing to pay for a gaming handheld like this? Go ahead and let us know in the comments. Thanks for watching and until next time, we'll catch you later. I gotta go play more games. Bye! If you want to know the best part of Computex, socks and flops, boy! Bye.