Back in May last year, I noticed the ROG Ally X handheld was not only in stock on JD.com, but the price was back to normal, and it even qualified for the national subsidy. Basically, a machine that originally cost over 6000 RMB ended up discounted by a little over 1000, so I got it for under 5000. The reason JD.com gives you is the “national subsidy,” but in reality you don’t need to bind any qualification for this subsidy—you just need your delivery address to be in Shanghai. A victory for the “Shanghai lords,” you could say. Naturally, I asked a fellow townsman bigshot in Shanghai to receive and buy it for me, and successfully got my hands on this handheld. A lot of people probably want to know: I’m a SteamDeck shill, so why did I buy ASUS’s handheld? How should you choose between it and the SteamDeck? I think I can explain it briefly with these points: It’s a Windows handheld, so it can play Windows-exclusive games (Galgame) It’s the only Windows handheld I know of that’s continuously optimizing power efficiency It’s the best Windows handheld I know of when it comes to self-made power control software At the time (2025), it had the largest battery capacity among Windows handhelds Some might bring up the ROG Ally + big battery mod, which has basically the same performance, but the biggest difference with the ROG Ally X is its 24GB of native RAM. The change that big memory brings is that you can allocate a large amount of VRAM to games, especially those poorly optimized ones that all need lots of VRAM. And from my observation, the root cause of stuttering when the SteamDeck runs those badly optimized games is often insufficient memory, and the ROG Ally X can clearly improve that.

The GPD Pocket is the follow-up to the GPD win. There were a few things I wasn’t happy about with the GPD Win: The screen was awful. After finishing Baldr Heart on it I felt like I was going blind. Bad cooling, which is why so many people modded theirs. I didn’t want to bother. Cheap build. All plastic, and the construction was just passable — usable, nothing more. The keyboard was useless. That thing was on the level of calculator buttons… worse than a Wenquxing electronic dictionary. So I backed the GPD Pocket crowdfunding campaign… and once it arrived, plenty of surprises.

As a handheld, the Surface Pro 3 kept me company for a long while. But eventually the newer Surface Pro 4 came out. Not a huge upgrade, but considering I spend more time with this thing than with my desktop, I figured I should treat myself. So I upgraded. On the whole the two machines aren’t that different. Most of it is a spec bump.

Yesterday — no, actually today — Microsoft released the Windows 10 developer preview. As a half-hearted Microsoft supporter, I couldn’t resist giving it a shot. First I played around with it in a VM, but it felt off. Not satisfying, not happy. So I wanted to try it on real hardware. Commercial OS dev builds are usually somewhat reliable — more reliable than the betas of quite a few Linux distros (no offense) — so on this fine afternoon I upgraded my Surface Pro 3 to Windows 10.