First, let me be absolutely clear: I am no "hater". I do not regret purchasing the Ally and I still think it is a great handheld PC. It is unquestionably more powerful and has a much nicer display than the Deck, which alone makes it an excellent choice.
This being said, the microSD card reader issue has not been handled well by ASUS. There have been thousands of reports about it failing after a few days of use, sometimes rendering the SD card itself unusable, sometimes not. Yet there has been no official acknowledgement of this obvious design flaw. As far as I can tell from personal experience, if a user complains long and hard enough about it, ASUS will grudgingly accept to repair the device (which I guess means replacing the reader with a new one). However, the process to send the faulty unit back is so long (several weeks) and cumbersome that it essentially deters the customer from exercising their rights.
Furthermore, since ASUS has not communicated *anything* about the actual cause of the fault or the steps that can be taken to prevent it from reoccurring, the unfortunate customers who do RMA their Ally (at a huge inconvenience cost) have absolutely no guarantee that the repaired unit will fare any better, making this option even less attractive than it already is!
ASUS made the decision to include a microSD card reader in the Ally, presumably to compensate for the limited storage capacity of the SSD and because their main competitor included this functionality. This decision was poorly implemented and early adopters have found themselves with an additional storage option that is basically unusable, which is tantamount to false advertising. The company must be held accountable.
Accordingly, I believe that it is high time for ASUS to apologise, issue a statement acknowledging the microSD card reader problem and offer some other compensation than an impractical and quite possibly useless return policy.
I have suggested elsewhere on this forum that offering a free Ally high-wattage dock (marketed at 70€ in my region) to those customers who have reported a faulty microSD card reader would be a good commercial and PR move. Such a one-off settlement should be acceptable to many (myself included) as the additional USB port would also help alleviate the limited onboard storage problem when docked. It would also only cost ASUS some lost business to the tune of a measly 10% of the price of the Ally itself, which is no doubt cheaper than the work and parts of a repair (so the only reason they would refuse such an arrangement is if they hope that most users won't bother to RMA their faulty unit anyway).
Let's see if this post gets enough traction to make ASUS take my suggestion seriously!
