I’m finally beginning to trust Microsoft’s handheld Xbox Allys

I still wouldn’t buy an Xbox Ally, and I still don’t think the tweaked version of Windows that shipped with it is ready for primetime. The Xbox Full Screen Experience (FSE) needs work. But two months after I panned the cheaper $600 white Xbox Ally and wasn’t quite sold on the $1,000 black one, one of my most-hated Windows issues is getting better.

I didn’t stop testing these handhelds after my October review; I’ve been playing Hollow Knight: Silksong and Blue Prince on them ever since. I installed FSE on an MSI Claw 8 AI Plus, too. And after too many updates to count, I’m finally beginning to trust two of these handhelds to save my game (and battery life) when I put them to sleep. Even the third isn’t as bad as it was.

Sleep has been the biggest reason to buy a Steam Deck or a Nintendo Switch over a Windows handheld. For me, it’s the whole point of handheld gaming. If I can pause and resume at any time just by pressing the power button, I can tackle big games five, 10, 20 minutes at a time and actually finish them. It’s a whole different gaming lifestyle when you don’t have to save and quit every session, and when you can just press one button to do it.

Windows has been terrible at sleep for years, but in December, I haven’t lost my game once with the pricier black Xbox Ally X when trusting it to sleep. I recently left a game open for almost exactly nine full days, and the game was right where I left off when I came back. Battery drain while sleeping seems reasonable, too: I’m only losing 4 to 8 percent of its battery from one day to the next. (I lost 40 percent of the battery during that nine-day span.)

There are other bugs: Sometimes I don’t have control right away after resuming from sleep; sometimes the Xbox and Asus buttons stop working for a bit when Windows decides to automatically update things in the background. And, after that nine-day stretch, Windows spontaneously decided I had to authenticate and reset my PIN before it’d let me log in.

Also, the SSD in my colleague Tom Warren’s Xbox Ally X died, so there’s that, but sleep worked reliably for him before then. Assuming the SSD is the drive maker’s fault, the Xbox Ally X is feeling like a product I can live with. (We’ve asked Asus about the SSD.)

The white vanilla Xbox Ally, with AMD’s Z2 A chip, is a different story. I’ve been testing two of them for months, and even after installing every Windows, Asus, Game Bar, and Xbox App update, including several that claimed to address sleep, I’ve watched both units repeatedly wake up without ever being touched. I’d leave them on my desk all day while I worked and watch them light up all by themselves, draining their batteries in the process.

On November 19th, I put a black Xbox Ally X and a white Xbox Ally to sleep, side by side, with 96 percent and 93 percent battery, respectively. Thirteen hours later, the white unit was completely dead, while the black unit was still at 91 percent.

On November 20th, I tried again at 88 percent and 82 percent battery, respectively. Nearly four days later, the white one was dead; the black one had 61 percent left.

I tried factory resetting one of the white units, and I think something has improved since then. I’ve had many days where my game’s waiting for me when I wake it from sleep. But on December 6th, I found it roasting itself inside my shoulder bag at 10:55AM. Logs showed me it woke itself up around midnight the previous evening and turned off its own screen at around 1AM, but never went back to sleep. Because its screen was off and its fan near silent, I didn’t notice it was still on next morning when I put it in the bag.

And on December 7th, that same factory-reset, fully updated Xbox Ally mysteriously stopped charging overnight at 54 percent.

Asus claimed it wasn’t yet able to reproduce my issues. But I’m seeing these problems across two different units, I’ve seen scattered reports elsewhere on the web, and we know that the Xbox Ally’s AMD Z2 A processor fundamentally supports fewer sleep modes than the Xbox Ally X. Bazzite had to consult with AMD to get sleep working in Linux on the Z2 A chip.

I’m not sure why Microsoft is taking so long to fix it in Windows, or how complicated the issue might be there. Microsoft didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, and hasn’t offered me a substantive comment in the past. But I wonder if it might be unique to that Z2 A chip, because I’m not having much trouble with the Intel Lunar Lake inside the MSI Claw 8 AI Plus, either, now that I’ve manually updated to a later BIOS that wasn’t showing up when I first tested the Xbox experience there.

With the Intel Claw 8, a handheld I originally couldn’t trust to sleep, I now can — and I’ve seen battery drain as little as 2 percent per day while it’s snoozing. I ran into bugs in the Insider Preview, including one black screen and a persistent issue that capped my frame rate at 30fps until I changed power modes, but bugs are to be expected there.

It took time for the Steam Deck to be fully baked, and perhaps Microsoft needs some time too. If it’s finally figured out how to put a PC to sleep, and the vanilla Xbox Ally is just one exception, that’ll change the whole conversation around Windows handhelds.

Even today, the vanilla Xbox Ally may no longer be a bad deal. You can currently find it for $489 at Amazon, or $499 at Asus, and just install Bazzite instead. Bazzite is more reliable than Windows, has higher performance, and is just all around better in my tests, unless you play games that use incompatible anti-cheat software or you’re tightly tied to a library of “Xbox” PC games.