Lenovo says its $1,100 handheld will also get the Xbox mode coming to the ROG Xbox Ally
The Xbox ‘full-screen experience’ is coming to the Lenovo Legion Go Gen 2 next year
Lenovo is the first company to confirm that it too will be getting the Xbox front-end coming to the ROG Xbox Ally.
The Asus ROG Xbox Ally and more powerful ROG Xbox Ally X will be released on October 16 and will feature the ‘Xbox full screen experience’ (FSE), a new mode that boots the handheld straight into an Xbox app instead of loading the full Windows shell.
By not booting the entirety of Windows, Microsoft says the Xbox FSE will allocate more system resources to running the game, meaning performance is optimised.
Although Asus’s handhelds will be the first to feature the Xbox FSE, it’s not permanently exclusive to those systems. Xbox will be rolling it out to other devices, including the original Asus ROG Ally and Ally X, over time.
Now, in an interview with The Verge, a Lenovo spokesperson has confirmed that the Xbox FSE will be coming to its newly announced high-end Windows handhelds at a later date.
The Lenovo Legion Go Gen 2 will also be released this October, and boasts an 8.8 inch OLED screen, a 144Hz refresh rate, removable controllers and a similar AMD Ryzen processor to the ROG Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X. It will cost $1,099 for the base model, all the way up to $1,479 for the model with the most powerful processor, 32GB of RAM and 2TB of storage.
Although the Legion Go Gen 2 will not feature the Xbox FSE at launch, Lenovo spokesperson Jeff Witt told the publication that it would be coming to the handheld in Spring 2026.
Once it arrives, players will be able to manually switch the Lenovo Go Gen 2 from its standard Windows mode to the Xbox FSE, freeing up resources for better game performance.
Last month Microsoft announced the the Handheld Compatibility Program, which it calls “a new Xbox initiative designed to make more games ready to play on your supported handheld”.
“We have worked with game studios to test, optimize, and verify thousands of games for handheld compatibility, allowing you to jump into the game without having to tweak settings or requiring only minor adjustments,” the company says.
The program is similar to the Steam Deck Verified tag, which developers and publishers have used as a selling point for Steam Deck titles for years. At launch, the Xbox equivalent will have two tags, Handheld Optimized (which means games are “ready to go” and Mostly Compatible (which means they “may require in-game setting changes for an optimal experience on handheld”).
