• The Lenovo Legion Go handheld gaming PC isn’t available in South Africa right now.
• A demo model, the first of its kind in the country, can be found at the Lenovo stand at rAge 2023.
• We got our hands on this unique device.

The Lenovo Legion Go is the latest handheld gaming PC to arrive on the market albeit only overseas. While competitors in this space such as the Steam Deck, ASUS ROG Ally and Nintendo Switch are all available locally, the Legion Go hasn’t arrived just yet.

That may change in the future as the device made a surprise appearance at the rAge Expo which is taking place this weekend between 8th and 10th December.

We were there at rAge for its opening day and we were so happy to see the Legion Go nestled amongst more common items from Lenovo such as PCs and tablets.

We were told by event staff that this is the very first Legion Go in South Africa and it had arrived just before rAge had kicked off.

We’ve seen tonnes of reviews of the Legion Go from other outlets in countries where the device is already available, but since it hasn’t landed on our shores just yet this was a rare opportunity.

Picking up the Legion Go and it is immediately apparent just how big this thing is. We have had extensive hours on the aforementioned gaming hardware from Valve, ASUS and Nintendo, but the Lenovo Go is in an entirely new weight class. It is both heavier than its competitors and it has the biggest screen. Check out this handy graphic from Windows Central for a comparison between the four devices.

Ergonomics are a big deal on any handheld but we were wondering how Lenovo was going to balance all the bulk of he Legion Go. Thankfully the generous size of the controllers means that your hands are rather comfortable in handheld mode. We can maybe see those with smaller hands struggling but, in the short time we had on the rAge show floor, it felt good in the hand.

Also good in the hand were the thumbsticks and most of the buttons. Our chief complaint is that the two trigger buttons were extremely soft and provided almost no feedback. Hopefully this is just a problem with the demo unit as bad triggers can ruin entire genres of games like driving and shooting titles.

Also a bugbear were the button on the right hand side of the controller which we kept mashing with out palm. These buttons are there to facilitate mouse mode (more on that later) but in handheld mode they’re a nuisance.

That aside the overall fit and finish is rather great and the large screen is nice to look at, but for the high price overseas we would certainly hope so. The Lenovo Legion Go sells for $700 in the US, which is ~R13 200 and that can go up to $750 (~R14 156) for more storage capacity, going from 512GB to the full 1T. Just keep in mind that both of those prices are without tax.

A potential South African release date and pricing has not been revealed at the moment. Truthfully, right now, we don’t know if the Legion Go will release in South Africa. That being said its very appearance at rAge has us hopeful.

We’re not only hopeful because we love to see tech released locally, but also because we like the unique things that the Legion Go is trying to do. Like the Nintendo Switch this device’s two gamepads on either side can be removed from the main unit. You can now play in tabletop mode with the gamepad halves in your hand or, unique to the Legion Go, the right gamepad half can be placed into a base that turns it into a mouse.

Because this is a full fat Windows machine, the Lenovo Legion Go can essentially be used as a handheld gaming PC, but also a notebook and even tablet. This versatility is what has us so excited for the Legion Go compared to everything else that’s on the market. With loadshedding showing no sign of stopping, we can also see a device like this getting more love locally.

For now all we can do is recommend heading to rAge 2023 if you want to try this very unique handheld for yourself. Hopefully Lenovo officially brings it into South Africa so there are more opportunities to try it out and even buy it if it suits you, and the localised pricing is fair.

We were originally inclined to like the Lenovo Legion Go in concept but this very short hands on has us optimistic both for its long term use and a launch in this country.