this is genuinely exciting news Uh welcome to where I’m staying I am currently in Santa Monica and I’m in an Airbnb where I’m recording this So this is the only space where I could get this done I’m going to be editing this uh this weekend for you guys to see it You’ll be seeing this on Sunday because the news will have been out by then And there are two big stories here We have the hardware story where it’s the partnership with Xbox and Asus and they have two new handhelds which we’ve kind of already seen And then there is arguably the biggest part of the story which is the software side of this where Microsoft is genuinely tackling the question of how do you use a PC gaming handheld using Windows in a way that is intuitive almost console-like and Microsoft has done a really good job here So we’re going to talk first about the software and then we’re going to talk about the hardware side and give you an idea of what you can expect there The first big thing is that this Xbox experience is something that gets loaded into So when you start up the system it actually jumps straight into this Xbox experience without loading any of the Windows desktop stuff So for all intents and purposes when you power it on it kind of jumps straight into there which is a question I think a lot of people wanted answered And it is a good first step foundationally of introducing how you use Windows on a PC gaming handheld Effectively what looks like the Xbox app plus+ and we’ll walk through a few of those things But up first one of the bigger things here that they’ve talked about that is absolutely huge and I hope more people talk about it is that effectively the Xbox controller is now looking like a first class citizen So when you get to like the login screen to enter a PIN you can do that by just doing it through the controller And you can enter pin code through the controller kind of like how an Xbox does Now when you log in you have all those same types of things you have with a pin code bottom Obviously entering text you can do through the Xbox controller as well Now I can’t show you any of that stuff so I can only kind of give you like examples of stuff that would represent what’s going to happen That is perhaps not set in stone just yet which is why we haven’t been able to show it But the more important thing here is that the Xbox controller even works in UAC prompts user access control rooms Typically whenever this happened the controller wouldn’t work at all and you’re going to have to use a touchcreen or a mouse or a keyboard Now that actually works So they’re Microsoft is fundamentally starting from brass tax here and removing what is not necessary for Windows and they’re doing a lot of a lot of heavy lifting which is truthfully very impressive So where we are right now is they are answering a lot of questions When you enter into this Xbox interface on Windows that’s all you have to interact with You will empty out into the desktop thing if you wanted to But for all intents and purposes when you’re using that that is how you interface with pretty much everything So if you have Xbox and Blizzard and Game Pass that’s how they kind of communicate to us what would be available But there are third party stores that will be able to be used inside of this as well like Steam So they do have all that We did not see any of that We only saw the basic Xbox app with Game Pass and Xbox apps on there but they’re doing a lot to make sure that any type of thing that you have to do to install a game manage a game play a game you are not touching any part of the Windows desktop at all So it is pretty interesting And when you think of that like how on a controller like if you opened up a window and you wanted to go back and do something else typically you’ like alt tab or you would swipe up and you go to the desktop Here what what’s going on is you would hold down the Xbox button that is now on the ally Xbox and that would bring up the Alt tab interface and then you can cycle through those and press A on the controller to select them Another thing that was kind of highlighted a long time ago was with the MSI claw 2 where all of the management type of stuff was actually done in the Xbox Game Bar where it was actually a widget for controlling everything That is now where Armory Crate resides So Armory Crate is now an Xbox widget in the Xbox Game Bar which is kind of a cohesive way for all of these different vendors to kind of have all of the management stuff that the vendor will produce but putting it inside of an Xbox widget so that the user experience side is always going to be fairly similar Even though those types of management things might be different between them ultimately how you engage all of them will be through the Xbox Game Bar which is really cool Another thing that they’re tackling which I I really don’t know how well it’s actually going to work because Steam is doing this for the Steam Deck where they had the Steam Deck verified system effectively that is a similar system that they are creating and how they’re going about that is because Windows has a bunch of telemetry that’s running in the background So they actually have a bunch of information that they’re getting for how games run on specific platforms and Microsoft is using that telemetry data to kind of automatically figure out what games can run how well they run and give you a generalized idea of how they run So it remains to be seen how well that all tracks out Steam Deck Verified is a system that not many people actually really like because it’s kind of all over the place It’s never something that people can rely on So it remains to be seen if what Microsoft does with all the Clemetry data actually aligns with anything that is worthwhile specifically what whatever rating system it is and how large that is in terms of categorizing what’s playable or not So that is a whole thing that remains to be seen So it doesn’t know if we’re going to have actual value for that at the moment But ultimately what this is is a foundational restructuring of Windows to work better for PC gaming handhelds And what I’ve seen and used is genuinely a good first step Now when we talk about the hardware side of things you saw what is the the Xbox Ally partnership in a handheld Now there are two different kinds and for all intents and purposes they’re very very similar to the Alli X In fact the higherend version which uses the Z2E has 24 gigs of RAM the same screen and pretty much everything else that’s very similar to the Alli X just with those handles that are grafted onto it and it’s a good bit chunkier So it remains to be seen how much better the Z2E is especially by the time this thing launches But all things considered the higherend version is like an Ally X with a Z2E in it So a Z2E 24 gigs of RAM They do note that it’s actually 8,000 mega transfers of RAM not 8533 So some of the leak data that we saw even for the Z2A which is Aith Plus had 8533 mega transfers on RAM And that from what they showed me was only 6,400 mega transfers So the leak data is not aligning with what is on the lower-end version of the Xbox ally partnership handheld And effectively that one is a Steam Deck Plus in terms of chipset and performance and power uh with 16 gigs of RAM and 512 diesel storage So um both of them are pretty interesting The lower-end version has a 60W hour battery The the bigger one the Z2E version has an 80watt hour battery Again just like the Alli X So performance-wise I’ve done a video on this and what you can expect out of this but that was also looking at it through the lens of having 85 33 mega transfers of RAM Now that we have different RAM configurations that is going to change So we’re going to have to kind of peel back on what we’re what we’re looking for in so far as expectations of hardware The other thing that was interesting to me and this is kind of known but they were highlighting that the Z2E does still have the NPU and it’s active Now uh if you may may not be aware the Z1E that’s in the Ally and the Ally X One of the things that AMD did to differentiate the Z1E from the 7840U is that they actually disabled the NPU on it And that is no longer the case on the Z2E So the AI MPU is a the AI cores the MPU is available there The other thing that is the difference between the Z2A and the Z2E is Z2E has um USB4 so you can use Thunderbolt for it and ASUS has a eGPU solution that is in a few different configurations but they have a mobile uh 5090 in there as well as the top end and that is actually a Thunderbolt 5 port but obviously you’ll be using USB 4 Thunderbolt 4 for the Z2E version and then that’ll fall back to uh USB3 which basically is the same thing for the Z2A Uh so really it’s just up to you if you you wanted to use that or not but obviously that’s going to be a pretty high cost So it’s really just about docking your machine and getting more performance Closing this out effectively what this is was just a preview event of things to come and more will be revealed on the hardware front of things so that we can get a better idea of how that’s all running and more will be revealed on the software end and how that all gels together But right now as a preview and what I’ve saw I am genuinely optimistic and I’m really excited that Microsoft is tackling this in an earnest way by them disrupting Windows itself and removing the desktop side like having that just stop in the background is pretty huge also having the game controller be a first class citizen and work at UAC prompts being able to work in pin codes uh keyboard stuff all of that and having the thought that the user experience the UX UI will be navigable by a controller is there and I saw it So great first steps I’m super optimistic It’s still early days I can’t wait to see where this goes That’s pretty much uh my video for today from my Airbnb So hopefully this video was informative As always guys thank you for your time and thanks for watching