To own a ROG Ally is to know the greatest pleasure and pain possible in the world of handheld gaming. More powerful than the Steam Deck, this machine gives you full access to any PC storefront. It also can be connected to a Mobile XG dock, which adds the power of a 3080 GPU (for a mere $1,500). This means a much better on-tv experience than the Steam Deck can provide, as well.

If you can get past the eye-watering price ($399 for the machine, $1.5K for the dock), this should be the ultimate hybrid gaming solution. But…

The updates required to keep this thing up-to-date are an enormous hassle. It feels like every other time you boot it up, the machine wants you to update the machine’s custom UI, Windows, or both. And to make sure your connection with the dock is up-to-date, you need to keep up with GPU driver updates, too. If you aren’t playing every day, and expect to take this thing on a trip, be ready to go through a series of updates the night before.

And then there is the battery life. You can’t get full power to the machine unplugged, and you can’t even get two hours out of it without external juice, anyway.

On top of all this, logging into the device is sluggish, the external memory slot is infamous for melting down 1TB cards, and some games will just crash unexpectedly (and frequently).

When it all works out, it’s great, but it’s a lot of hassle to get to the optimal experience.

Last November, I got the PlayStation Portal, which was truly revelatory.

I had experienced mixed results with streaming games in the past, but this device offered an experience that was basically perfect. Absolutely as good as the WiiU tablet experience, with range that allowed me to play anywhere in the house. Unlike the ROG Ally, the battery could last for hours on end, and updates are kept to an absolute minimum. It was so useful that I’ve shifted the majority of my play time to PlayStation 5, and have upgraded that device with a lot more hard drive space and better headphones (the new Pulse earbuds). I never thought a setup would overtake my Nintendo Switch playtime, but this did it… and it solved my “play when I want”challenge so well, I stopped using the ROG Ally altogether.

But then… Persona 5 Reload came out. I was tempted to splash out $70 to get it on my platform of choice, the PS5. But it was also available Day 1 on Game Pass, for both Xbox and PC. So… I chose to go the PC route, and plugged my ROG Ally and Xbox Series X in for the first time in 2024.

After the expected irritation of updating the ROG Ally, the download process from the Xbox App went smoothly. I loaded it onto my Xbox console, too. The game runs beautifully on both devices, and cloud saves are seamless – it’s easy to jump from one device to the other to keep playing.

But what if I used the ROG Ally to stream the game from my Xbox, instead of run Persona 3 Reload natively? What if I basically used the ROG Ally as a PlayStation Portal, but for Xbox?

It’s not intuitive, like the PlayStation is. But it sets up quickly once you know the path. Open the Xbox app on your ROG Ally, go to profile, navigate to ‘systems used’, and select ‘remote play’. And… just like the PS Portal, you get a seamless experience in-house, indistinguishable from playing natively. No stutters, no frame drops. Perfect. And you can play this way on the ROG Ally for hours, without being connected to a power source.

If you want to take that break from the house and head out to Peet’s for a caffeine refill and run the game natively, you can. You’ll still need to be able to connect to the internet – for me, the solution is turning my phone into a hot spot. But once you have authenticated the game, you can play the without any connection at all. Not exactly Switch level convenience, but a real advantage over the streaming-only PS Portal solution.

PS Portal is still a much nicer device to use, with its excellent ergonomics and haptic feedback. But using the ROG Ally as my “Xbox Portal” is wonderful, and makes the handheld substantially more valuable than I expected over time.

Keep in mind, the games I play on both devices are single-player, so I can’t speak to what the experience is like playing a competitive twitch shooter while streaming. But for solo games, access to both PlayStation Portal and ROG Ally are game changers, giving me access to play on any console, whenever I want (when I’m home). I have access to hundreds of games, and I no longer need to wait until the whole family goes to bed to play.

So is the ROG Ally worth owning? At $200 cheaper now than at launch, yes, if you want to stream from an Xbox or PC. It’s great for that. I’d skip the pricey Mobile XG – I don’t see myself using that much. I thought I’d never use the handheld at length after getting my PS Portal, but Xbox streaming has given it a reason for being again.