Zotac Zone: New OLED gaming handheld shown with unusual Manjaro Linux distributon
Computex 2025We have managed to get our hands on the latest version of the Zotac Zone as part of the company's Computex 2025 showcase. Teased before Taipei's annual tech expo, the new Zotac Zone is still at the prototype stage, despite being first presented in January during CES 2025.
To recap, the original Zotac Zone arrived relatively late in the life cycle of AMD's Ryzen 7 8840U APU. By contrast, Zotac's second-generation gaming handheld should mirror the performance of current generation options like the Ayaneo 3 or OneXFly F1 Pro (curr. $1,439 on Amazon) thanks to its Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 APU and Radeon 890M iGPU.
Also, Zotac has now confirmed that the new Zone features 24 GB or 32 GB of RAM, depending on the SKU. Meanwhile, a 48.5 Wh battery powers proceedings coupled with a 1 TB M.2 2280 SSD, a microSD card reader and a pair of USB4 ports. Like its predecessor, the new Zone offers Hall effect joysticks and triggers, as well as two built-in trackpads like a Steam Deck.
Arguably, the Zone's OLED display is a star of the show with its 7-inch diagonal, 1080p native resolution, 120 Hz refresh rate and 800 nits peak brightness. Zotac gave us a brief opportunity to showcase its Manjora Linux distribution too, which has a dedicated handheld UI like Steam OS and flyout menus for adjusting settings quickly, like display brightness and power consumption. Incidentally, the unnamed distribution utilises the Wine emulation layer to run Windows games too. Please see our video below for more details.
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