Hands-on: Zotac’s Zone is a truly unique Steam Deck OLED challenger

All the cool kids have a Steam Deck-style portable gaming PC these days. (And by “cool kids,” I mean “multi-billion-dollar PC manufacturers.) Zotac is ready to sit at their lunch table with the new Zone, but this design offers a lot you can’t get elsewhere. For a breakdown of all the unique features, Adam checks it out on the Computex show floor.

At a glance the Zone looks a lot like the Steam Deck, and I mean a lot. It’s the only Windows-based handheld to get two track pads on either side of the screen, and the only one to offer analog sticks below and to the inside of the device, in “PlayStation style.” Those are also hall effect sticks, meaning they should never suffer from stick drift, and they’re surrounded by circular scroll wheels for changing volume or zooming, or whatever else you’d like to assign.

The Zone has another first among its Windows-based competition: an OLED screen. The 7-inch, 120Hz panel can pump out an impressive 800 nits of brightness, putting it on par with some high-end phone screens. For those who love the visual splendor, this makes Zotac the only major supplier with an alternative to the upgraded Steam Deck OLED. Underneath is a Ryzen 8840U APU, which is pretty typical of these machines, along with 16GB of DDR5 memory.

Other unique choices in the design include a “clicky” d-pad beloved by fighter fans, switches between clicky and full-length mode for the triggers (like on the Xbox Elite controller), USB-C ports on the top and bottom, a deployable kickstand, and a 512GB M.2 SSD in the full-length 2280 size, like on the new Asus ROG Ally X. That should mean cheap and easy upgrades for the end user. I’m a fan of the front-facing camera for Windows Hello login.

With the proviso that Zotac’s Zone hardware at Computex is a pre-release engineering sample, Adam got his hands on it to give his impressions. Its size is around the same as the ROG Ally, which is on the smaller side of this category, though the Zone’s touchpads do mean that its speakers fire from the bottom instead of the front face. He says the ABXT buttons are a little on the mushy side — hopefully that’ll get worked out before release.

Which is when, exactly? Zotac didn’t offer precise release info for the Zone, and if you want a price, fuggedabouddit. But it should be hitting the market sometime in the second half of the year.