After 5 months I'm still blown away by how amazing it is
I bought myself a used Z1E at the beginning of the year, the first thing that I spent my scholarship on. I paid about 330€, with some accessories, and man that was a great purchase! Installed Bazzite basically day one and I'm having a blast ever since. No matter what game I try, it's always playable (granted, there are cases like jedi survivor, where I had to run two frame generators on top of each other and play at 768p to have a decent frame rate with enormous input lag, but hey, it still was fun).
I've had my eye on handheld PCs even before the steam deck was released, and even more after that since they became much more popular, but I'd never expect for them to become this cheap with that level of performance.
Gaming for me was quite hard lately, since I live about 50/50 in my house and in my dorm, and my gaming PC can be only in one place at the time, and I don't really have the time to play for multiple hours at once. But now, I finally can play basically anywhere, even on a train, which is absolutely crazy! Tbh I don't know if I haven't played more games in that year, since, well ever.
About a month ago I did the battery mod, 79 Wh from AliExpress with an aluminium plate and 3D printed backplate (I may not look that good as the original but has better grips and it's stupidly cheap when you have your own 3d printer). After that the Ally feels almost perfect, about 3 hours of battery life in more demanding games, which is absolutely more than enough for me.
I'm not even mentioning everything else that comes with a fact, that this is literally a PC. I used it as a smart TV for my projector, as a computer when I didn't have access to my laptop and probably a few more things that right now I can't even remember.
Tl;dr fantastic device with amazing price and insane capabilities, would recommend to anyone who's not scared of PC gaming