The Steam Deck

The Steam Deck is like a Nintendo Switch on steroids, it is a fully functional Linux PC that puts mobile gaming first.

The Steam Deck is a feature rich device with two touch-sensitive joysticks designed to reduce the risk of stick drift (A problem that plagues the Nintendo Switch), two trackpads for refined mouse movement, a touch screen that allows you to operate a keyboard or navigate the display, a d-pad and standard four button layout, two triggers and two bumpers,  four programable buttons on the back, and a gyro sensor designed for FPS games to help with micro-adjustments in your aim. This control feature set gives the player a large amount of options in choosing their playstyle. If you choose too, you can also connect Bluetooth peripherals and play with them instead like a mouse and keyboard or a controller. The Vast amount of control options already sets it apart from it other mobile device counterparts.

The biggest Deal with the Steam Deck lies not in its ergonomics but in its internal hardware. The Deck rocks an AMD APU where the CPU has with 4 cores and clocks up to 2.4-3.5GHz, and the GPU clocks in at 1.0-1.6GHz, this is all fed by 16 gigs blisteringly fast DDR5 RAM. The storage depends on the model but excellent speeds are to be expected out of NVMe SSDs so there should be no trouble with load times. The display is 1280 x 800px (16:10 aspect ratio) and providing a 720p output, the image will be crisp for a 7 inch display and allow for more frames to be pushed out of the hardware.

There are is also a dock available for separate purchase which allows the user to connect wired peripherals, a monitor, and ethernet port. This means you can use this device as a standalone computer if you felt like it.

The only downside is that the cheapest version of the Steam Deck only comes with 64 GB of storage, this is not enough space to have almost any modern game installed so if you are planning to buy a device I recommend going for the higher end models. Although you can expand the storage with a micro SD card, I would not expect the speeds to be very good through this method.

Check it out here!