When you think of gaming, Lenovo might not be the first brand you think of. While it may be one of the best-selling PC companies in the world, many have used their machines more for work and school. That’s where Lenovo’s gaming wing, Legion, comes in.
Launched in 2016, Legion has been working to make Lenovo a more household name for gamers. To help with that, the company recently released its Lenovo Legion Go handheld PC. Akin to the Asus ROG Ally, the Legion Go is a Windows-based device that wants to help players bring the best in PC gaming wherever they are at all times.
“Our passion as a company as a whole is to is to make technology accessible to all people,” Lenovo director of North America consumer marketing Chin Wu said. “And with that ‘smarter technology for all’ ethos, we want to bring the PC gaming experience on the go.
“The Legion Go is making gaming more accessible to new players so they’re not confined to their desks anymore. People playing outside in cafes; people traveling and playing on airplanes. [It’s all about] support gamers’ aspirations to be able to play freely wherever they like and with whomever they like.”
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The Lenovo Legion Go is a handheld PC that took inspiration from several other gaming devices, including the Nintendo Switch, to build upon it and make it work for its consumer base and potential future consumers.
Starting at $699.99, it features an AMD Ryzen Z1 CPU with AMD RDNA 3 graphics, 16GB of LPDDR5x memory, an 8.8-inch QHD display with a 144Hz refresh rate, a 49.2WHr battery, and even detachable left and right controllers. It also comes with three different PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD sizes — 256GB, 512GB, or 1TB.
Making Sure Anyone Can Enjoy Gaming On The (Legion) Go
The claim that Lenovo wants to make its technology accessible “to all people” isn’t some catchy motto it puts out there. The company takes a lot of pride in making its devices as accessible as possible for all users. To do so, it utilizes an internal Product Diversity Office (PDO). This PDO’s main goal for anything Lenovo developers and releases is “accessible for all from any standpoint”.
Everything from the controller design and shape to the screen to the overall size of the device was put through multiple rounds of testing to make sure as many people could use it as comfortably as possible.
Why Windows For The Lenovo Legion Go?
As mentioned earlier, the Legion Go runs on Microsoft Windows, again, like the competing ROG Ally but unlike the SteamOS Linux distribution used on the Valve Steam Deck.
As far as why it’s a Windows PC, it coincides with Lenovo’s goal to let players play however and whatever they want, wherever they want.
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“There’s just a lot more variety of games to be played,” Wu said while mentioning the ease of playing games from Steam, Epic Games Store, Battle.net, and more on the Legion Go.
She added: “You can even use it as a tablet or traditional PC.”
With it being a Windows machine, Lenovo knows there’s a concern about things like bloatware and unnecessary program installations. The company worked to have a dedicated UX software called Legion Space that acts as a central gaming hub with easy-to-access settings, launchers, and more. It’s something that Wu says the company’s research and development (R&D) team spent a lot of time working on to make sure it was up to the “Lenovo standard”.
“The Legion Space and the UX are tested a lot and the experience so far that we’ve heard is positive,” she said. “I know where you’re getting at is there’s a lot of, in the gaming community, there could be a lot of grumblings around Windows, but so far none of that, none of that.”
Should something ever become a cause for concern, Wu says, the good news is that the software on the device can, and will be, continually updated.
With the entire company behind the mission and the market there for the taking, Lenovo is hoping that people will see what the Legion Go is capable of when it comes to gaming, and that it becomes the number one device when people talk about handheld PCs.
“This is one of the best innovations that Lenovo has made in gaming, and we strongly believe that this is one of the best gaming technologies that we’ve brought supporting gamers’ aspirations,” Wu said.
The Legion Go is available now on Lenovo.com and through retailers such as Best Buy, MicroCenter, and others.
