It won’t come as a huge surprise, but the Lenovo Legion Go 2 is confirmed, although the name is subject to change. Lenovo’s gaming category manager for the APAC region, Clifford Chong, discussed the likelihood of the next-generation handheld, but tempered expectations when it comes to a timeline.
The Lenovo Legion Go is one of the best handheld gaming PCs that money can buy, largely down to its huge 8.8-inch, 1600p display. It often catches comparisons to the Nintendo Switch, thanks to its removable controllers, but it has much more powerful gaming hardware under the hood than the Switch, including an AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme CPU.
During a Lenovo Legion Go roundtable interview, Clifford Chong not only spoke about the Go’s first months on the market but also about what’s coming next for Lenovo in the handheld space.
“We are still spending a lot of resources improving on the current Legion Go over the span of the last six months since launch,” said Chong. “We have unlocked from day one till now a lot more experiences and there are still engineering efforts to try and bring the next wave of features to the product. Definitely, it’s a product category that we do see potential in and we continue to invest and we are looking towards when the time comes right, of course having the next generation provide even more features.”
It’s a bloated and loaded quote, that’s undeniable, but Chong gives flowers to the work still being done on the Legion Go while acknowledging that the next generation will exist because Lenovo sees handheld gaming PCs as an important market.
We recently covered Phil Spencer’s public call for a bigger Xbox presence on gaming handhelds, but in doing so he also admitted that devices like the Lenovo Legion Go are limited due to their use of the Windows OS. Whether or not Lenovo would persist with Windows is a question for a later date, but what’s most curious about this open discussion on the next generation, is the timing in relation to competition.
The Steam Deck 2 seems the most likely new handheld gaming PC to launch first, as the Asus ROG Ally, Legion Go, and MSI Claw are all much newer devices. However, if Valve is allowed to lead the way once again with little challenge, there is the risk that it will again dominate the handheld market, regardless of when the Legion Go 2 comes to market.
We also recently covered the reveal of the Playtron, a successfully funded startup looking to bring a brand new Linux-based OS to gaming handhelds, while eventually releasing its own at some point down the line. The OS notably brings Arm support, which could open the door for Nvidia to enter the handheld market, a move it must already be seriously considering.
Time will tell when Lenovo plans to release the Legion Go 2, but my gut feeling says 2026 seems like a reasonable prediction. Valve will likely target 2025 for a new Steam Deck model to turn the screws on its competition.
If you’re yet to be converted to handheld gaming for fear that it’s limited, we can show you how to play Xbox games on Steam Deck, and also run you through how Steam Deck Proton works to make countless games compatible with Valve’s handheld.