Lenovo Legion Go S with SteamOS will land May 25 for $50 more than expected

Lenovo has the honor of releasing the first SteamOS handhelds not made by Valve, and it looks like you won’t have to wait long to get them. Legion Go S handhelds with SteamOS ship May 25, according to a new Best Buy listing spotted by The Verge, but go for at least $50 more than the original $499.99 price Lenovo promised.

The Legion Go S powered by SteamOS now starts at $549.99, which gets you an 8-inch, 120Hz OLED display, comfortable controls, a fingerprint reader / touchpad, 16GB of RAM and the AMD Ryzen Z2 Go chip. If you’re willing to pay $749.99, you can get the same package, but with the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme, which originally appeared on the Legion Go, and 32GB of RAM.

Perhaps more important than the specs, both handhelds come pre-loaded with SteamOS, which means they should be as easy to setup and use as the Steam Deck, and be able to play the vast majority of games thanks to Valve’s Proton compatibility software.

Lenovo already released its first Windows 11 version of the Legion Go S back in February for $730. We found it expensive and a bit hampered by Windows in our review, but otherwise solid. At the time, a SteamOS version for $500 seemed like a promising alternative. But for $50 extra, some of that shine has come off, particularly when you can get the already excellent Steam Deck OLED for the same price.

It’ll take a full review to suss out how different SteamOS makes the Legion Go S, whether paired with the Ryzen Z2 Go or the more powerful Ryzen Z1 Extreme. At the very least, it’s nice to have more SteamOS devices in the wild.

The Legion Go S powered by SteamOS is available to pre-order now for $549.99, and will ship on May 25. The Ryzen Z1 Extreme model ships on the same date for $749.99. Lenovo is also offering a version of the Ryzen Z1 Extreme Legion Go S with Windows 11 for $829.99, too.