It does have one major hardware flaw, though. The design of the ROG Ally places the micro-SD card reader directly above one of the exhaust vents for the system’s cooling hardware. This is thought to be the reason that the Ally can both cook MicroSD cards to death, and destroy its own card reader. Our own ROG Ally test machine suffered such a fate, destroying an expensive 512GB Samsung PRO SD card and taking the device’s card reader with it.
This is an encouraging move from ASUS, a company that has at times struggled with the perception of its customer service in the US. Offering repairs not only for the device but reparations for destroyed storage media goes a long way toward salving the pain of folks who may have lost media to the poor design of the Ally’s microSD card slot. It won’t replace any lost data, but hopefully you had backups, right?
ASUS says that it has resolved the issue with the Ally through a combination of physical changes to the design and alterations to the system’s firmware that adjust minimum fan speeds. We haven’t verified these claims for ourselves, but if you have an Ally and you get it fixed, we’d be curious to see if the issue crops up again. Let us know in the comments about your ROG Ally card slot story.