is a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
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I still wouldn’t buy an Xbox Ally, and I still don’t think the tweaked version of Windows that shipped with it is ready for primetime. The Xbox Full Screen Experience (FSE) needs work. But two months after I panned the cheaper $600 white Xbox Ally and wasn’t quite sold on the $1,000 black one, one of my most-hated Windows issues is getting better.
I didn’t stop testing these handhelds after my October review; I’ve been playing Hollow Knight: Silksong and Blue Prince on them ever since. I installed FSE on an MSI Claw 8 AI Plus, too. And after too many updates to count, I’m finally beginning to trust two of these handhelds to save my game (and battery life) when I put them to sleep. Even the third isn’t as bad as it was.
The Xbox Ally X. Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
Sleep has been the biggest reason to buy a Steam Deck or a Nintendo Switch over a Windows handheld. For me, it’s the whole point of handheld gaming. If I can pause and resume at any time just by pressing the power button, I can tackle big games five, 10, 20 minutes at a time and actually finish them. It’s a whole different gaming lifestyle when you don’t have to save and quit every session, and when you can just press one button to do it.
Windows has been terrible at sleep for years, but in December, I haven’t lost my game once with the pricier black Xbox Ally X when trusting it to sleep. I recently left a game open for almost exactly nine full days, and the game was right where I left off when I came back. Battery drain while sleeping seems reasonable, too: I’m only losing 4 to 8 percent of its battery from one day to the next. (I lost 40 percent of the battery during that nine-day span.)
There are other bugs: Sometimes I don’t have control right away after resuming from sleep; sometimes the Xbox and Asus buttons stop working for a bit when Windows decides to automatically update things in the background. And, after that nine-day stretch, Windows spontaneously decided I had to authenticate and reset my PIN before it’d let me log in.
Also, the SSD in my colleague Tom Warren’s Xbox Ally X died, so there’s that, but sleep worked reliably for him before then. Assuming the SSD is the drive maker’s fault, the Xbox Ally X is feeling like a product I can live with. (We’ve asked Asus about the SSD.)
Close-up on the white Xbox Ally. Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
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