Hands on with the $799 ROG Ally X: comfy to hold despite bigger battery and SSD than the original

I've just had some time to play around with the ROG Ally X over at Asus HQ in Taiwan—only moments before the handheld is made available for pre-order at $799.

The new handheld gaming PC, which is more of a mid-generation upgrade than something new altogether, includes a number of key improvements, including to the RAM, battery, SSD, fans, layout, thumbsticks, d-pad and buttons.

The biggest and best upgrade of the lot is the improved battery size: the ROG Ally X has an 80Wh battery—that's double the ROG Ally at 40Wh.

«What's crazy is that we did it without drastically increasing the weight or the thickness of the device,» Whitson Gordon, Asus senior manager of product marketing, says at Asus HQ.

The new ROG Ally X weighs 678 grams—70 grams more than the original Ally. It's not a noticeably heavy device, however. I shifted the device from one hand to the other easily enough while fiddling with my camera settings, though how it feels to game on long-term is something I wasn't able to test.

«You will see we were able to offset that number of interesting things and we kept the weight distribution replaced really central,» Gordon says.

The chassis is a bit thicker for the bigger battery, but I didn't notice much of a change without the original Ally to hand for comparison. It's hardly hefty. Some of the changes made to the shape of the device have been to improve its general comfort and feel, such as angling the buttons and thumbsticks in a more natural way.

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I didn't get a chance to test the battery at the event, either—I don't think Asus or my fellow event go-ers would've looked too kindly on me holding onto one for well over an hour or two. For reference, in our original testing of the ROG Ally it managed to run PCMark's gaming benchmark for around 57 minutes before giving up. That should be significantly improved, if not actually doubled, on the ROG Ally X. 

The chip