Lenovo’s Legion Go 2 adds a big OLED screen to battle the Steam Deck | usagoldmines.com

We’ve been waiting for it since CES at the start of the year, but it looks like Lenovo is finally ready to give its big daddy Legion Go a second generation. The Legion Go S is a smaller, more affordable option that more directly competes with the Steam Deck. But the Lenovo Legion Go 2 is all-in on Windows and a more powerful Ryzen Z2 Extreme platform. It’ll land in October for (gulp) over $1,000 USD.

The original Legion Go was a bold expansion of the portable gaming PC design, incorporating a larger 8.8-inch screen and detachable controllers (a la the Nintendo Switch), one of which could work as a pseudo gaming mouse for shooters. The Legion Go 2 keeps all of these design elements. The shape has been updated to be a bit more ergonomic, but it’s holding on to its distinctive features, including an oversized touchpad and extra mouse buttons on the right “TrueStrike” controller, double USB-C ports, and a kickstand for the central screen portion. Oh, and those new controllers are backwards compatible with the original, which is nice.

Lenovo

Speaking of which, that 8.8-inch screen gets an OLED upgrade. The resolution is actually lower at the same size (1920×1200), but that seems like a solid call to me, considering the small size and restrictions on a portable platform with integrated graphics. It still supports up to 144Hz of refresh with VRR going down to 30Hz, a big help if you’re trying to run intense games on this thing. And you might be tempted to, as it uses the latest and greatest AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme platform, with 8 Zen 5 cores, a 16-core integrated GPU, and RDNA3.5 graphics. It’s a beast, at least in terms of these APU designs for handhelds.

Other specs include 32GB of DDR5 8000MHz RAM and 2TB of Gen4 storage. Those are both qualified with an “up to” prefix, ditto for the Ryzen Z2 Extreme chip, so expect the base model to offer less. But the newly expanded 74-watt-hour battery, over 50 percent bigger than the original, should be steady across all SKUs. Ditto for the MicroSD slot with 2TB of maximum expansion, as well as the hall effect joysticks.

Lenovo

Lenovo is calling this model the “Legion Go (8.8″, 2)” as its full, official name. It’s one of the worst product names I’ve ever seen, but there it is if you’re having a hard time finding it in a Best Buy search. It’s scheduled to go on sale starting in October, with an “expected starting price of $1,049.00.” And again, that’s the base model, which will presumably have less than the maximum specs listed above. Ouch. Note that “expected” wording — considering the current tariff madness, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the US price shift around a bit, and I wouldn’t even guess at what it might look like in other territories.

The Lenovo Legion Go 2, which is what I’m going to call it, will probably be positioned against the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X, the upgraded version of the handheld getting Microsoft’s blessing as a portable PC gaming machine. Asus gets an advantage with early access to a game-focused Windows 11 interface, but that may come to the Legion Go 2 and other handhelds in 2026. Asus’ handhelds are also expected to ship in October, but they still don’t have official prices.