Lenovo Has Officially Revealed Its Legion Go Windows Gaming Handheld

After several leaks, Lenovo has officially revealed the Legion Go, including its full featureset and pricing.

Let’s start with price: €799, from Lenovo’s own press release, or $ 699 in the US. Given that it has the same AMD Ryzen Z1 processor as the ASUS ROG Ally, Lenovo is demonstrating that they are ready to go to a price war. That may be risky business for these gaming companies, but its great news for us consumers.

The Legion Go distinguishes itself from the ROG Ally with a larger, 8.8”QHD  screen, that’s fitted in a considerably wider, thicker, larger handheld. The Legion Go is about as pocketable as the Atari Lynx, but Lenovo did think things through when they made these choices.

As a consequence, the Legion Go isn’t designed to use gyro, and Lenovo came up with several ways around that. For starters, as you may already know, it has detachable controllers, like the Nintendo Switch’s Joy-Cons. Lenovo is selling gamers on laying their Legion Go on a table, while they freely move their hands around holding their TrueStrike controllers.

Second, and as you may have already seen, the right TrueStrike controller has a 10 point touchpad, which will also be useful for general navigation. But they have an even better solution for FPS gameplay. A switch (small font, not Nintendo’s) at the bottom of the right TrueStrike controller allows you to enable FPS mode.

As it turns out, FPS mode turns the controller into a sideways mouse, which also seems to be held very similarly to those strange looking ergonomic mice. So not only will it be a better control scheme for FPS games, it will be better on your wrists too. The device will come with a base for easier holding, and Lenovo claims the final base will also be magnetic.

The Legion Go packs a beefy 49.2Wh battery, and Lenovo touts smart battery management, battery bypass when connected, and Super Rapid Charge. And for cooling, Lenovo uses Coldfront thermal technology, with a liquid crystal polymer 79 blade fan, that only emits less than 25 db fan noise.

While this is anecdotal, this author can vouch that Lenovo has the experience in the laptop space to deliver on such promises for this device better than ASUS can. It’s not the power itself that matters, but the engineering to make power efficient Windows devices on battery, that don’t overheat. Lenovo’s tried and tested laptop history includes two decades of making Thinkpads, and lessons learned from the netbook era, to where they are today.

So Lenovo’s pitch for handheld PC gaming is a bit different than what Valve, ASUS, and the other smaller companies making more expensive devices are offering. They aren’t partnered with Microsoft either, but unlike ASUS, Lenovo didn’t need that partnership to make their Legion Go the best it can be. We’ll find out in two months if what they’re pitching is significantly better enough that they give the Steam Deck, and maybe even the Nintendo Switch, a run for their money.

You can read through the Lenovo Legion Go’s features below.