What about long flights or train rides?

You usually have access to power in long flights between continents and national train lines.

But you don't want to play that long on a portable device anyway, position is just terrible for your posture/neck and I don't think it is really healthy. What you want is alterning occupations: video games, reading, sleeping, drawing, card games, listening to music, making music, chatting, eating, moving in the main aisle, etc.

The planes used for long flights typically have power outlets, in my experience. Trains too but my experience is more limited there.

That's 7h in ideal circumstances, running light games with a low screen brightness. If you open a full AAA game and let the deck really start slurping power it will get like 1.5 hours at best in my experience. I can get 4 hours when playing emulated PS2 games, but around 1.5 playing something modern like The Outer Wilds on my steam deck.

The ally is much less efficient with the same battery capacity. I've seen reports of like 40 minutes of battery life when running high power draw games.

> If you open a full AAA game and let the deck really start slurping power it will get like 1.5 hours at best

But would you want to spend that time playing with an undocked 700gram device in your hand, in a bad posture looking down at a screen? Even my much lighter Switch I would not play more than 45 minutes straight in portable mode.

Very true, but that comparison gives you two play sessions between charges on the steam deck instead of one for the ally. Considering one of the biggest criticisms of the steam deck is battery life, and as a steam deck owner, I find the ally very uncompelling. It goes out of its way in almost every aspect to draw more power: runs windows, higher-power chip, higher-resolution screen. Then does nothing to solve battery life. What's the point of a handheld if you're tethered to a wall, a smaller bag to carry the charging brick?

The ally just seems to be chasing 'look how high the specs can go' instead of practically improving on the steam deck.