Software

We praised the Zone at every corner up to this point, with only the battery, trackpads, and the speakers being sore points. But the software is, hands down, the weakest part of the Zotac Zone.

The One launcher feels like an unfinished product in an early Beta stage. It doesn't include many features, and those included are often buggy and unrefined. For example, you can switch between Gamepad and Desktop controller modes, but the launcher doesn't offer any other buttons, keys, or functions to map to the controller aside from the default controller buttons. The only way to map keyboard keys to the inbuilt controller buttons is by hooking a keyboard to your Zone, which we did.

This way, we managed to capture screenshots, enable and disable MSI Afterburner performance overlay, enable and disable RTSS FPS limiter, and more without needing a keyboard. However, someone who doesn't know that the only way to map keyboard buttons is to hook the Zone to an actual keyboard won't be able to use it as a proper Windows PC. By the way, the Zone doesn't allow you to map mouse buttons even if you connect a mouse, forcing you to use the half-baked trackpad click implementation. Being able to map mouse clicks to the triggers when in Desktop controller mode would work much better.

ASUS Armoury Crate, on the other hand, allows you to map any keyboard button, as well as mouse buttons, controller buttons, and a nice selection of custom actions (like summoning the on-screen keyboard or capturing screenshots) to any of the inbuilt controller buttons right there in the app. You don't have to connect a keyboard or a mouse; just select any button in the controller menu, and you're presented with a ton of custom key bindings to choose from.

Further, you cannot tweak the default gamepad profile at all, which means that while the default controller profile is enabled, the two rear buttons are unusable. And since we didn't manage to make custom gamepad profiles work, we never actually used the rear buttons at all during our testing. Zotac representatives told us they didn't encounter this bug on their end, so the issue might be limited to our review sample.

This limitation makes the in-game experience of using the Zone more akin to a handheld console and not a handheld PC. With our ROG Ally, we can assign keyboard and mouse buttons to Desktop mode and use the device like a PC. We can also assign secondary functions to every button since the two rear buttons can be used as secondary function modifiers. This allows us to map certain keyboard keys as secondary functions to Gamepad controller mode and, for example, use Quick Save, open the inventory, or access the map without pressing the pause button or visiting the map screen.


The One launcher also force-enables the Taskbar auto-hide option every time it launches at Windows startup, which can get very annoying if you like to have the Taskbar shown at all times. It also doesn't work in full-screen mode when you disable the Taskbar auto-hide option. Other bugs we encountered include the rear RGB strip turning on at random times even though we set RGB brightness to zero in the One launcher, some games going full black screen after you switch the resolution, also mentioned in Rock Paper Shotgun's review of the Zotac Zone, the Quick Menu sidebar not showing when you summon it, or minimizing the game you're playing, and more.

One particularly nasty bug is games using only 15-16 W of power even with the 30 W power profile active. This bug doesn't happen every time you play a game, and Zotac representatives have told us they can't reproduce the bug, but we did experience it quite often, and it was definitely there. Someone less experienced with Windows handhelds might not notice it at all, which can lead to significantly lower gaming performance, so we hope that the issue is limited to our review sample.


One thing we like about the One launcher is the included power profiles. You have a choice between three preinstalled power profiles, and you can also create custom ones. The three default profiles work at 8 W (Quiet), 15 W (Balanced), and 28 W (Performance). The fourth, custom profile comes with a fully adjustable power slider you can tweak to your heart's content. The catch is that you cannot freely switch between different power profiles via Quick Menu; you have to open the One launcher to activate a different profile. We recommend selecting the Custom profile in the One launcher and then freely tweaking the TDP slider in the Quick Menu.


While buggy and with a dearth of features, at least the One launcher is stable and performs rather briskly. It doesn't offer many extra features, but besides bugs, it's serviceable enough to use as a game launcher if you don't want to mess with third-party options such as Playnite, or use Steam in Big Picture Mode.


The Quick Menu includes just a handful of options, doesn't work in some games, and minimizes some games when summoned.

The most baffling thing about it is that you cannot navigate it with the D-pad; you must use the right trackpad. This sours the whole experience, especially since most other Windows handhelds, as well as Steam Deck, allow you to navigate their quick options with the D-pad.

At the end of the day, the software is by far the weakest and most disappointing thing about the Zotac Zone. The lack of features makes the device feel more like a console than a proper handheld PC when gaming, and the bugs further sour the experience. Still, if we're being honest, the One launcher provides just enough options to allow owners to use the Zone for gaming purposes without major limitations, aside from the bug that prevented us from using custom gamepad profiles. But again, according to Zotac, the issue is likely limited to our review sample.

Before moving on, let's talk a bit about the Windows experience. While it can be pretty frustrating during the initial setup when you constantly have to navigate around Windows menus designed for a mouse and keyboard, using Windows on a handheld isn't that annoying.

Yes, the navigation is slow, and you need to use the on-screen keyboard quite often, but once you finish the initial setup, settle in, and start focusing on the gaming part of the equation, Windows turns from a major frustration into just a nuisance you only need to interact with when installing a new game launcher or program, changing some setting, or troubleshooting issues.