Alright, here goes nothing. I stumbled upon Zotac’s booth at Computex 2025—honestly, I almost walked past it. But there it was, the Zone 2, kinda glimmering like it was trying to look cool or something. It’s got a slick 7-inch AMOLED display, powered by AMD’s Ryzen AI HX 370 APU. What’s wild, they went with Manjaro Linux instead of Windows or SteamOS. Man, that’s bold. But maybe they know something I don’t. Or they just like penguins.
The original Zone 1 showed up—hmm, when was it?—September last year, riding on the Ryzen 7 8840U. Zotac’s not exactly racing to push these out, but hey, they seem confident basically showing off a sequel that folks can’t even buy yet. The guy there kept calling it “Zone 2,” though he hinted they might rename it. Seriously, just pick a name already!
The innards, though. Check it out: AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, rocking 12 cores. Quite the beast! It’s like they said, “Forget the Ryzen Z2 Extreme, let’s amp this up!” They’ve got memory options up to 32GB and a 1TB SSD you can swap out yourself. Kinda makes me wonder if I’m overloading my own laptop with tabs…
But wait, sidetrack! Those who love pretty screens, it’s got that covered—a 7-inch touch screen, 1080p, with 120 Hz. Something about 800 nits, which I think means it’s bright enough for any adventure. And yeah, a kickstand like the Nintendo Switch. No idea why I noticed this, but man, we all need a good kickstand now and then.
Operating on a Linux version that’s apparently solid as a rock. KDE Plasma 6, for those keeping track. I heard you can swap to Windows if you fancy, but who’s got the time for setting up all that? There’s Proton support too, so gaming shouldn’t be a mess—unless you hit those annoying multiplayer roadblocks. Isn’t it always something?
Battery’s 48.5Wh and gives the same life as the first Zone. For ports, you’ve got microSD, USB4, the usual suspects. Wireless? Oh, it’s got WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2, so no worries there. Anyway—wait, no—yeah, summer’s gonna be interesting with this thing looming on the horizon. Keep an eye out, or don’t—Zotac probably wants a slice of the handheld pie soon.
