Whats the current state of handhelds?

[Tefal]

As title really what's the current state of handhelds pcs like the ally/steam deck? (Is there an msi one out soon?)

Both in performance and usability, example titles for me personally would be say BG3, wh 40k rogue trader, Gothic armada 2, rdr2, dune spice wars, coh3 (Darktide but I assume controler controls are poor for m&kb mp games) and assorted free epic games.

How is the screen for viewing on them is it awkward for games with text heavy interfaces?

Is there something big on the horizon that's out before April?

And how do you feel if you have one vs a sufacepro/15" laptop?

how do they pair up to tvs for casual gaming?

 

[Tefal]

It depends how fussy you are. I've never been a gamer who's that bothered with high settings, and have just played through the ME Legendary Edition and Witcher 3 on a Steam Deck OLED. I'm now playing Guardians of the Galaxy on it, and have also been enjoying Victoria 3.

For the price, it's a fantastic machine and playing those games handheld is pretty mind blowing to me. You're obviously not going to get the performance on a 7 inch handheld that you get from a desktop or decent laptop, but those are likely to cost twice as much and I wouldn't try to play either of them on the tube.

In summary, as long as you can accept that you won't be running some of the most cutting edge games, or that you may be running games at medium or low settings, it's great and the price and portability trade off makes it more than worthwhile. If you want to be running the latest games at high settings, it's not for you

My main thing is I usually travel to Italy about twice a month 2 hour flight at least 2 hours in the airport and an hour on the train. I lug my old big saber 17" laptop with me but its way too big to use on the plane and the battery barely lasts 2 hours absolute tops.

It's sort of a toss up between getting something small and powerful but very expensive like a razer blade or one of these to help pass the time.

 

[Tefal]

think you'll need to change game pattern to get the battery life you are after without plugging in. If you mix in some easier to run games typically indy or some older titles then the oled steam deck can hit over 4 hours battery life

Plugging in isn't too bad I don't mind carrying a battery pack +some of the trains and the airports have plugs (if can get one)

It certainly seems the cheaper option vs a compact gaming laptop. Taking advice from the general hardware thread for the price of a razor or a legion I could get the oled deck+maybe upgrade my desktop leave my saber in italy and have a reasonable pc either end and the deck for the journey. Vs 2.5k+ laptop

If I had an sd card/external memory can I move games into and off rhe deck as easy as j can on steam for the pc? Would add some versatility as well storage seems fairly limited na world where everg game seems to be 125gb plusses these days.


The ally seems to get better performance overall? But worse battery? Is that right? Does running Windows drag it down vs Linux?

Most of my games are steam anyway and as I've been out for mostly 4 years there should be plenty of older story games.

I understand on the ally front there's 2 processor options but no oled or mocroeld

 

[Tefal]

So think I'm going to go with the steam deck, the ally having it seems a bit more performance/resolution but more overall issues and higher price.


Just one last thing am I right that the 512gb steam deck has the glossy oled screen and the 1tb steamdeck has an etched matte screen? I can find a lot of people talking about it but the steam page doesn't actualy mention the screens being different just some unique themes/keyboard for the 1tb on.


I want the glossy screen