Oh man, so there I was, wandering around Zotac’s booth at Computex 2025. Imagine this: a 7-inch AMOLED screen, paired up with AMD’s beastly Ryzen AI HX 370 APU from that Strix Point clan—but they’re calling it the Zone 2, though who knows if that name will stick?
I got sidetracked thinking about the Zone 1. Remember that launch in September last year? Man, they really took their time. Anyway, they’re pressing onward. Dropped it like it was no big deal at CES, then boom—here it is again at Computex. Looks like they might call it Zone 2—then again, they might not. Your guess is as good as mine, with it likely debuting, uh, sometime this year.
Now, let’s talk about what’s under the hood. This AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 APU is no joke—12 cores, a crazy iGPU, and what was that? A 50 TOPS NPU? Seems like everyone else is chillin’ with the Z2 Extreme, but Zotac, oh boy, they want more oomph. And you can tweak between 24GB or 32GB LPDDR5x memory and swap out for a 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD. Customization, folks!
Amidst all this tech madness, I noticed the screen — 7-inch, 1080p AMOLED — so bright it practically giggles at sunlight with 800-nits of peak brightness. And yes, a kickstand too. Mmm. Kind of like a Switch but, let’s be honest, way cooler. It’s got these touchpads, hall-effect sticks and triggers, a radial thingamajig… I mean, the works. All of it running on Manjaro Linux. KDE Plasma 6, to be exact. Feels a bit like SteamOS but isn’t. Follow along?
And I nearly forgot the behind-the-scenes stuff. A battery pushing a respectable 48.5Wh, a microSD slot, couple of USB4 ports, connectivity up the wazoo with WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2. Oh, and there’s more—a mesh design for cooling at the back, dual-stage triggers, extra buttons… nice touches, really.
So, while I’m waiting for them to spill the rest of the beans—pricing, exact launch timings—I’ve subscribed to Tom’s Hardware on Google News. Gotta keep up, y’know? Click that follow button, and stay tuned.
