Lenovo has just announced the first licensed Steam OS handheld, and a short time with the device reveals a familiar experience.

Valve is making a notable shift with its portable gaming strategy as Lenovo debuted a new edition of its Legion Go

We may put handhelds like the Asus ROG Ally and Steam Deck up against each other, but the real power of Valve’s handheld is that it’s affordable. For as good as devices like the original Lenovo Legion Go are, they’re hundreds of dollars more expensive than what you can pick up the Steam Deck for. The Legion Go S with SteamOS is changing that story.

Lenovo has finally announced a new line of Legion Go handheld PCs, with one that will come installed with SteamOS out of the box. The new model is called the Legion Go S, and it's the world's first handheld PC from a third-party manufacturer using Valve's operating system.

The Steam Deck launched in February 2022 and within months, it had changed the landscape of the video game industry and popularized the idea of handheld, portable gaming PCs. But the Steam Deck wasn’t powered by Windows as most gaming PCs are these days.

The Steam Deck has been the biggest PC gaming hardware story of the last few years. So it’s no surprise that the idea of running SteamOS (perhaps the most celebrated component of that machine) on other handhelds like the Legion Go S is also a big deal.

Valve will begin allowing third-party handhelds to license SteamOS starting with Lenovo's new Legion Go S. At CES 2025, Lenovo announced that it will ship a version of its upcoming Legion Go S handheld called the "Powered by SteamOS" that will run,

The Legion Go S with SteamOS will launch in May for $499.99, bringing hardware specs that put it on par — and, in some cases, well above — the Asus ROG Ally and other powerful