The Asus ROG Ally will be officially introduced later this week on 11 May. Ahead of its launch, we managed to spend a brief time with the handheld gaming console at a media preview, and we were told that the Ally will be coming to Malaysia as early as Q3 2023.

With that in mind, the ROG Ally could arrive on our shores as early as July 2023, though this is the best case scenario. Given that the console has not been launched yet, there’s no word on the local pricing of the Ally either, though an earlier leak claims that it will retail at $699 (about RM3,100) for the range-topping AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme model.

Compared to its main competition, the Steam Deck, the ROG Ally offers a number of upgrades, including a higher resolution 7-inch 1920 x 1080 display with a 120Hz refresh rate. The Steam Deck, on the other hand, has lower resolution 60Hz panel, though it has a taller 16:10 aspect ratio.

Aside from that, the ROG Ally can also be connected to the (proprietary) ROG XG Mobile external GPU enclosure for higher fidelity gaming. It’s said to run on Windows 11 as well, so it’ll be interesting to see how this would impact the battery life of the handheld gaming console.

Other specifications of the Ally include up to 16GB of LPDDR5 dual-channel RAM and 512GB PCIe Gen4 SSD – this is said to be upgradable – a microSD card slot for further storage expansion, as well as a lightweight chassis that tips the scales at 608g.

The Asus ROG Ally will debut this Thursday on 11 May. Though it’s only set to arrive in Malaysia sometime in Q3 2023 – so that would be July at the earliest – it’s good that we have confirmation on the local availability of the handheld gaming console. We’ll find out later this week just how much the Ally will be priced at.