Xbox Handheld Game Console Design Teased In ASUS ROG's Sneak Peek Trailer
ASUS ROG has taken to X (formerly Twitter) to tease an upcoming Xbox-branded game console in a short 34-second animated/rendered trailer. The actual console only appears in a few seconds (see the screenshot above), but it's enough to give us an idea of the design language. Assuming this is representative of the final design, we're basically looking at an upgraded ROG Ally X built for Xbox.
Let's first address the elephant in the room. Today is April 1st, otherwise known as April Fools' Day. The post on X actually went up yesterday afternoon, though in recent years, we've seen PR agencies release tongue-in-cheek announcements leading up to the day of pranks. This, however, is almost definitely not an April Fools' gag.
Our little robot friend is cooking something up...#ROG #ROGALLY #PlayALLYourGames #NextLevelGaming pic.twitter.com/nDG7rlEIhH
— ROG Global (@ASUS_ROG) March 31, 2025
There's been chatter about an official Xbox handheld for quite some time. More recently (as in a few weeks ago), it was rumored that Microsoft had teamed up with an unspecified PC gaming OEM to develop a handheld with the Xbox branding as part of something called Project Keenan. Days after the rumor spread, Tom Warren at The Verge claimed the unnamed OEM was ASUS, and that the secret initiative was actually called Project Kennsm.
Fast forward a few weeks and we now have our first official teaser. It also drew a humorous response from the official Xbox account on X, which posted the 'Awkward Look Monkey Puppet' meme...
— Xbox (@Xbox) March 31, 2025
We can split hairs over whether this amounts to a confirmation of the partnership, but it's not exactly subtle. The trailer shows an ROG Ally X and custom Xbox controller being flung through air and into a tube, where the two devices then merge into a single object obfuscated by a cloud of smoke and faint lighting.
While we don't get a clear look at the finalized console design, there is a point in the trailer where a robot is mashing away on a workstation in front of a monitor. It displays four key teasers: "Marathon stamina," "More capacity," "Faster speeds," and "Fresh look!" complete with an exclamation mark.
To put it all into context, the ROG Ally X sports a 7-inch IPS display with a 1920x1080 resolution, powered by an AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme processor, 24GB of LPDDR5-7500 memory, and 1TB or 2TB of SSD storage. It also sports an 80Whr, 4-cell lithium-ion battery.
In our testing, we mustered a little over two hours in Elden Ring in Turbo mode. Some games drained the battery faster in Turbo mode (like Hogwarts Legacy and Cyberpunk 2077), while several were slower to deplete the battery in Performance and/or Silent modes.
If we had to guess, the Xbox handheld will see a bump to AMD's Ryzen Z2 series processor, which AMD unveiled at CES. Hopefully we'll find out soon, as a launch now seems imminent.
