Lenovo’s SteamOS-based gaming handheld is up for preorder now

The wait is almost over. You can get Lenovo’s curvy new Legion Go S gaming handheld right now if you’re okay with it running Windows. But if you’re like me, you’re eagerly waiting for the SteamOS variant, which will be the very first third-party gaming handheld to run Valve’s SteamOS. That one is now up for preorder at Best Buy.

The retailer is offering two models of the Legion Go S Powered by SteamOS, its full and unwieldy title. The $550 base model comes with 16GB of RAM, a 512GB storage drive, and an AMD Ryzen Z2 Go processor. For $750, you can bump that up to 32GB of RAM, a full 1TB of storage, and the older but more powerful Ryzen Z1 Extreme chip. According to the preview page, they’re scheduled for release on May 25th, at least in the United States. (I’ll point out that $550 is 10 percent more than the price we heard back at the announcement… but a lot has happened in the last couple of months.)

The Legion Go S ditches the blocky body and Switch-style removable controllers of the original Legion Go handheld, but keeps a lot of the other features intact. While the more ergonomic body is a definite improvement, it’s not enough to get over the general jankiness of running Windows on an 8-inch device, and that lower-power chip certainly doesn’t help with the software overhead. Being a poor deal compared to the Steam Deck sure doesn’t help. For more info, check out our review.

Before Lenovo confirmed it would ship the first non-Valve PC handheld to run SteamOS back at CES 2025, we’d heard that Valve was also looking at the Asus ROG Ally family. The most recent preview version of SteamOS mentions that it’s laying down the groundwork for that hardware expansion. But if you’re tired of waiting, you can always try rolling your own with some Linux-based alternatives.