The handheld gold rush continues as Lenovo Legion Go 2 prototypes appear online

An early version of the upcoming Lenovo Legion Go 2 has appeared on BiliBili, a Chinese social media site. Announced at CES 2025, it was one of the first devices to officially partner with chip maker AMD for its Z2 Extreme. Despite the seven months since its announcement, this is the first time anyone from the public has gotten their hands on Lenovo’s follow-up handheld.

While no one can confirm it, according to a Reddit post, this is due to a factory shutting its doors. All development kits appear to come from here, and have wound up on second-hand site, GoFish (Xianyu). VideoCardz says that this site is a haven of various engineering samples and the like.

A major issue here is that we can’t even get figures on the Z2 Extreme chip. The prototype is housing the last generation Z1 Extreme, and appears to be more about ensuring the current device works before it moves onto the next part of production.

Legion Go 2’s specs look tasty, even without a Z2 chip

Outside of lacking the new chip, it appears that the prototype handheld still packs what’s coming. That includes the OLED panel with 144Hz refresh rate. It’ll also support Variable Refresh Rate, so games that don’t run smoothly should still look smooth. There’s also that great big 74 Watt hour battery, something that made the Asus ROG Ally X a little more usable than its non-X variant.

According to the video, the prototype comes with 32GB of RAM, something that’ll be more important as these handhelds begin to reach further. The APU chips used in these machines are like a combination of a graphics unit and the regular processor. Rather than have a dedicated graphics card, the chip carries it and shares the memory between the two.

On the Ayaneo 3’s 32GB version, this allows you to split the RAM up to 16GB between memory and graphics, allowing for more headroom in demanding games. The same concept applies here, but will presumably be handled – hopefully – a little more gracefully.

I reviewed the original Legion Go and did not get along with it at all. All these new features might be great on paper, but if the software and controllers face the same issues as last time, it’ll be another headache-inducing bit of kit.

Lenovo is swinging by a third time in the handheld race

The handheld PC market has been in a gold rush-like stage since Valve stormed onto the scene. While the Steam Deck isn’t the most powerful of the bunch these days, it still remains the tippy top of the pile thanks to its “complete” feeling. Sure, some games don’t run on Linux because of weird anti-cheat reasons, but here we are.

A major problem with these Windows handhelds is Windows itself. It’s not built for the form factor, and all the issues that come with Windows 11 impede the experience. Microsoft is tackling this themselves with the upcoming Asus partnered ROG Xbox Ally systems later this year. The Legion Go might have been the worst of them, with lousy software, and it tried to do too much rather than focus on making a decent gaming machine.

They’ve since gone back to the drawing board with the Legion Go S, which comes in Windows and SteamOS flavors. These run the Z1 Extreme on Windows and the weaker, more comparable to the Steam Deck’s chip, Z2 Go on the Linux-based version. Thankfully, it seems that Linux works just fine on the Legion Go 2 prototype, however.

There’s no release date yet, but rumors indicate that it could launch in September. Expect a lofty price.