Anyone who is interested in a gaming handheld can hardly avoid looking at Lenovo’s Legion Go these days. The manufacturer, otherwise known for laptops, is launching its latest generation of gaming on the go. What gamers can expect from the portable.
The Legion Go is one thing above all: cleverly designed. This means that the two controls on the left and right of the 8.8-inch display can be used as joypads even if they are not connected to the screen but rather have it standing on the table in front of you. For this purpose, a stand is attached to the back of the housing. In addition to being a handheld optimized for gaming, the device is also a tablet on which the Home version of Windows 11 is installed. Here you can install Steam, the Epic Game Store and Co. as usual and start the respective games. Alternatively, Lenovo offers a separate Legion interface from which the device and the installed applications can be controlled and managed.
The hardware put together by Lenovo is able to compete with the other handhelds from Nintendo (Switch), Valve (Steamdeck) or Asus (Rog Ally) or to outshine them in one place or another: The Touch -Display has a resolution of QHD (2,560×1,600), has a refresh rate of up to 144 Hertz and has a brightness of 500 nits; The 16 gigabytes of RAM are extremely fast at 7,500 MHz; and the AMD processors of the “Ryzen Z1” series provide the necessary computing and graphics performance to display even top modern games smoothly.
The power required for this is contained in a battery with a capacity of 49.2 Wh. The manufacturer does not provide any information about how long this is enough for mobile gaming, but states that the battery can be charged from zero to one hundred in 80 minutes. The reasons for this are understandable, because the performance of a mobile PC like the Legion Go depends on many factors: the brightness of the display, the number of running applications, the graphical settings, etc. However, the competition provides an indicator for operation under full load: The Rog Ally from Asus, which is equipped with comparable hardware, lasts around 45 minutes with full system utilization before it has to be plugged in again.
Lenovo deserves praise for the concept offered in “FPS mode”, which is only available on this device. FPS stands for “First Person Shooter” and these are generally known for being much more precise to control with a mouse than with the thumb sticks attached to gamepads. So Lenovo installed an infrared sensor at the bottom of the right controller, like the one used in a computer mouse.
In the accompanying holder provided, the controller then stands upright like a joystick, but can be pulled and pushed like a mouse. Users hold the second half of the controller in their other hand, replacing the keyboard with their left thumb on the thumb stick. This equips FPS gamers with a mouse and keyboard on the go and allows them to remain competitive in the online mode of first-person shooters.
Lenovo has also equipped the Legion Go with a DisplayPort 1.4 connection and equipped it with WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2, which theoretically means that a wireless keyboard can also be connected. The 512 gigabytes of hard drive storage in the standard version aren’t exactly generous for PC games, but at least it’s SSD storage, which makes loading times pleasantly fast. If the memory becomes scarce, it can also be expanded almost as desired using the microSD slot. In short: For prices starting at 799 euros (depending on processor and hard drive size), Lenovo is launching a handheld gaming PC that should be of interest to a wide range of gaming aficionados.
