Lenovo, the Legion Go S and SteamOS: Where are we coming from? What are we waiting for? Where do we stand, what are we going to do?

It is not clear whether that is actually true, as was told to journalists during a pre-recorded briefing.

The Z2 Extreme is an interesting mix of Zen 3 and Zen 5cCPUs and GPUs that can boost performance by more than 50 percent, and can be powered on by five more watt than last-gen, though the specifics haven’t been provided.

Zhu says Lenovo is targeting between two and 2.5 hours of battery life in demanding heavy games — which lines up with the basic math of dividing a 55 watt-hour battery by 20 watts, assuming the rest of the system doesn’t eat up a lot more. There will be versions of the Z1 Extreme chip in some markets. All Legion Go S can fit full-length M.2 2280 solid state drives.

BTW, Valve isn’t keeping key Steam Deck features like precompiled shaders to itself, or anything else, for that matter. Yang and Griffais say it will be one SteamOS, and the Legion Go S and any future SteamOS devices will get the same updates as the Deck, minus hardware-specific tweaks.

Valve tells me Lenovo is currently its only partner for a SteamOS device — there are no other third-party SteamOS devices currently in the works. But Griffais hints that Valve is close to publicly releasing a new beta of its SteamOS that just might possibly start working on other handhelds as well. (Valve previously confirmed to us that it was building toward some level of support for the Asus ROG Ally in SteamOS as well.)

In January, the Windows version will go for $712.00 with 32gigabyte of RAM and 1 terabytes of storage. In May, the real experiment will begin when one can pick between a $499.99 Windows version of SteamOS that has 512-gbyte of storage, a $599.99 Windows version that has 16gigabyte of storage, or a $349 steam deck display that has 2 terabytes of storage.

However, the company is not going all in on SteamOS. It will be shipping a Windows version of the Legion Go S this month, four months ahead of the SteamOS models, in order to hedge its bets. The model of Windows is white.

That handheld will be the new and improved version of the Legion Go S that ditches the Nintendo Switch-like kickstand and game pads for a lighter, more traditional design with a sculpted grip.

It’ll also be one of the few handhelds on the market to offer a 120Hz variable refresh rate screen — a highly desirable feature that lets low-power handheld gameplay feel smooth, even if it’s not generating lots of frames. That screen will be lower in resolution at 1920 x 1200, too, and feature a hopefully power-sipping new AMD Ryzen Z2 Go chip. (It’s a Lenovo-exclusive chip, by the way.)

It might be able to address every complaint I had in my Legion Go review by adding a larger 55 Watt battery and a pair of levers, as well as being able to adjust the lighting around the game’s controllers.