this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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They're jumping into a very crowded space, one where Valve is the first-to-market. That said, Valve is good at proving a hardware market viable and then flubbing at actually dominating it (VR, PC set-top boxes) so I could see somebody like Lenovo winning at this.
I'm kind of surprised they went for the Switch/Tablet form-factor for this instead of targeting the phone scale, but Lenovorola already cratered at trying to do this as a phone once before (Moto Z with the gamepad mod).
Valve don't care about being the market leader in hardware though, they're just happy to create a new market for people to play Steam games on!
Aha,they are basically doing it for charity!
Sure, let's go with that
It seems like every one of these new handhelds is trying to have the best specs in the market no matter what. The ROG Ally was sold as a more powerful steam deck, and now the Legion Go comes in with a better screen and battery. It does seem really big, though.
The Logitech G-Cloud is similarly top-specced and pricy, although iirc it's supposedly more lightweight and comfortable than its counterparts. It's getting very crowded in that space, I don't envy any of these companies that jumped onto this band wagon and found everybody else doing the same thing at the same time.
I've tried using gamer-clips on my phone and the top-heavy weight distribution makes them uncomfortable despite the lower-mass of phone+controller, so I can see how that would be a design challenge. I still wish Lenovorola had stuck to it harder with the Moto-mods, but I suppose the death of the Atom processor line and Windows Phone means that any such device would have to be Android, and gamers want x86-64 PC-compatible devices, and that's probably not doable in a phone form-factor.
I'm eyeing the GPD Win Mini right now. It's not out yet and I'm waiting for reviews but it looks like a comfy small handheld with great specs. Not quite a phone form factor but it's close enough. May be close to what you're looking for.
looks.
Ooh, that's neat! My only complaint looking at it is that they didn't figure out some place to put a right-side thumbpad for a better mouse-mode. Joystick mouse emulation is a miserable solution, and the central thumbpad is too far for gaming (ask anybody who played Mario 64 or Metroid Hunters on the DS). My dream machine would be to use the old Blackberry trick of making the right-side of the keyboard able to masquerade as a touchpad (you literally run your thumb along the keyboard and it's a pointing device), add a face-toggle-button to switch between mouse-mode and keyboard mode, and then add a scrollwheel shoulder-button.
Valve wasn't first to market by a long shot. Valve was the first to offer a great price and a great operating system. But the general category of devices existed long before the Deck. They just were fucking expensive.