The upcoming ASUS ROG Ally has generated a lot of buzz well before its official launch date of June 13. However, not all of that buzz has been positive. Review units of the Windows 11 portable gaming PC were sent out to media outlets well before launch, and many have complained about certain aspects of the device.
ASUS has previously said it plans to make improvements and add new features to the ROG Ally before the $699.99 PC actually ships to ordinary non-media gamers. Now The Verge reports that the device will be getting improvements in one specific area targeted by those early reviews: its battery life.
Some reviews said that the ROG Ally lasted around four hours on a single charge, at most. Even ASUS's global marketing director Galip Fu admits that 10 percent of the people who preordered it canceled after those early reviews, even though many of them were very positive about other aspects of the portable gaming PC.
Fu stated that ASUS didn't pay enough attention to improving the device's battery life at its lower wattage levels like 9W or 15W. He says that after putting in some software changes, the ROG Ally should get a 10 to 20 percent boost in battery life. One of those software changes will let owners turn off one of the cores inside the device's AMD Z1 Extreme's CPU during gameplay,
One thing ASUS won't be doing is adding a bigger battery inside the ROG Ally. Fu says that would "drastically increase the overall weight of the device." However, he does say that ASUS wants to release a product that will rival the success of Valve's Steam Deck gaming device.
He stated, "We’re trying to keep up for all the supporters we have of ROG Ally. We will not let them down.” Hopefully, that means a better overall portable gaming PC at launch, and, if it's successful, an even better second gen ROG Ally in the future.
Source: The Verge
