It’s now looking very much as though the new Lenovo Legion Go S will indeed run SteamOS, with one of the designers of the Steam Deck now scheduled to attend Lenovo’s CES handhelds presentation at CES 2025. According to a new email circulating from the company, an event during CES 2025, titled Lenovo Legion x AMD: The Future of Gaming Handhelds, will bring us more information.
What’s key here is that Valve’s presence is being teased. The current best gaming handheld is the Steam Deck, with companies such as Asus and Lenovo taking a stab at trying to dislodge its position. Now, it seems that Lenovo might be the first company to adopt SteamOS over Windows 11 in one of its next-gen handhelds.
Recently, the Valve branding guidelines have been reublished. These include details on all sorts of aspects of Steam branding, from how the Steam logo should look and, more interestingly, where a “Powered by SteamOS” logo should be placed on a box.
SteamOS support isn’t explicitly mentioned in the email, which has been shared by The Verge, but the email does take time to mention that the co-designer of the Steam Deck, Pierre-Loup Griffais will be in attendance. There are also very clear, explicit leaks of a Lenovo handheld with a Steam button plastered on it.
The leaks of the Lenovo Legion Go S show off the full handheld with detachable controllers, much like the original model, and that Steam button. If Lenovo is partnering with Valve, this new device will be the first SteamOS handheld outside of the Steam Deck.
Ayaneo did plan a SteamOS device but later decided to use Windows 11 instead. The Microsoft operating system has been the default on other handhelds, but has been criticized for not offering the best user experience on this form factor.
Lenovo is also expected to launch two different handhelds at CES. Both look set to be based on the AMD Z2 chips, but it’s unknown if both will use SteamOS. The leaks surrounding the Legion Go 2 still show it with the Legion branded button, rather than the SteamOS one.
It could be that Lenovo is still planning to use Windows 11 on its more powerful AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme handheld, the Go 2. The Go S, with the Steam branding, is expected to use a weaker version of the Z2 APU.
AMD is set to announce its next-generation hardware, including updated processors and chips at CES 2025. The company’s plans for mobile chips look like they’re not only going to shake up the handheld market, but potentially also inject some juice into the best mini gaming PC designs, potentially bringing decent integrated GPUs to these small machines.