1 month ago
23
In July 2021, Valve revealed the Steam Deck, a Switch-like handheld device packed with features including a huge variety of control options, a 7-inch touchscreen, the ability to connect to external displays, and a quick suspend / resume feature. The device began shipping in February 2022, starting at $399.
With an unprecedented degree of support from Valve and the help of the gaming community, it progressed from being a “glorious mess” in our initial review to becoming one of The Verge’s favorite gadgets of 2022 and something other companies couldn’t really match. More than two years after the Steam Deck launched, the landscape is very different now that new competition has arrived in the form of Windows-powered handhelds like the Asus ROG Ally, the Lenovo Legion Go, and Ayaneo’s assorted decks.
Now Valve’s new revision of the Steam Deck adds an OLED screen along with tons of other improvements that Sean Hollister says make it “everything the original should have been.”
We’ve been keeping a close eye on the Steam Deck and rivals, and you can read all of our coverage here.
Damn, Polygon beat me to the Ayaneo 3.
Plante, direct-messaging me on Slack:
For me being on steroids is not inherently a good thing. people’s hearts explode and their privates shrink
Oh! Well then. That DOES sound like the pre-production model they sent me. For a better “Steam Deck Plus” experience in the meanwhile, try this!
I plugged an Nvidia RTX 5090 into a gaming handheld
Two weeks ago, I showed you how the world’s fastest graphics card works in a small form factor PC. To my surprise, Nvidia’s RTX 5090 Founders Edition delivered the vast majority of its performance even in a 12.7-liter desktop with a five-year-old CPU.
It made me wonder: what if I plugged this card into a handheld gaming PC instead? So I did, and let me tell you: it’s a wonder to behold. It’s enough to make me believe in a rich future where handhelds get more powerful when you dock them at home.
From Steam Deck to Steam Brick.
The smaller and lighter Steam Brick says goodbye to the Steam Deck’s screen, controls, and battery and stuffs the remaining electronics into a custom 3D-printed housing featuring just a USB port and a power button.
What handheld PCs should do to fight the Nintendo Switch 2
I stopped buying most games for my Nintendo Switch the day I bought a Steam Deck. My Switch has been a Mario and Zelda machine ever since. It’s simple: the Steam Deck took the Switch’s best trick — pick-up-and-play portability — while offering more games that run better. I can easily resume the ones I started on my desktop PC, or continue to play portable titles on my desktop and marvel at improved graphics.
But the Nintendo Switch 2, coming later this year, may change that value proposition. Not only will it continue to be the console that attracts families and kids with inventive, surprising, must-try exclusive Nintendo games that use its detachable Joy-Cons’ many tricks, but it also has a real chance at convincing the enthusiasts who might otherwise buy a handheld gaming PC — or who were waiting for handheld PCs to become less of a wild west.
The $900 Ayaneo 3 is the most exciting PC handheld the company’s yet made
Ayaneo builds the best-looking handheld PCs in the business, but they’ve always been boutique. The 2023 Ayaneo 2, for example, cost $1,300 for an arguably worse experience than the $400 Steam Deck. But that experience isn’t dampening my excitement for the new 7-inch Ayaneo 3.
Not only does this one start at $900, within striking distance of the highest-end handhelds you’ll find at retail, it’s the most feature-packed portable I’ve seen — with two USB4 ports and OcuLink and RGB-ringed Hall effect joysticks and your choice of two seemingly killer screens. Perhaps most exciting: a way to finally fix a handheld’s joystick and button layout to match your ergonomic preferences!
Maybe giant gaming handhelds are where it’s at
If you thought the Steam Deck was big, let alone Acer’s Nitro Blaze 11, get a load of this Frankenstein’s monster of a PC gaming handheld I’ve cobbled together. This is a pre-production version of Asus’s upcoming ROG Flow Z13 tablet combined with a GameSir G8 Plus clamp-on mobile controller; the Z13’s AMD Strix Halo processor makes it probably the most powerful handheld gaming device you can play. That is, of course, until your hands cramp under its weight.
It’s utterly ridiculous, I love it, and I’m beginning to think big screens are the future.
Hey that’s me, chatting about the Intel / Quanta prototype modular handheld concept that surprised me at CES.
If you’d rather have more photos and not-quite-details about this prototype, find ‘em here.
I played with the new Legion Go 2, too.
The SteamOS and/or Windows-toting Lenovo Legion Go S was the best handheld of CES 2025, but it wasn’t the only Lenovo portable I took for a spin! The third time was the charm for this detachable-controller and kickstand Legion Go 2 prototype, which I found working at the third venue I encountered it.
Microsoft is combining ‘the best of Xbox and Windows together’ for handhelds
Image: The Verge
Xbox chief Phil Spencer has been dropping hints about an Xbox handheld for months, but what about Windows handheld gaming PCs? Jason Ronald, Microsoft’s VP of “Next Generation,” tells The Verge that we should expect to see the Windows handheld gaming experience change within this calendar year.
Ronald was a roundtable panelist this evening at an AMD and Lenovo event titled “The Future of Gaming Handhelds,” which was mostly a coming-out party for Lenovo’s new Legion Go S. But he did hint onstage that Microsoft plans to bring the Xbox experience to Windows PCs, rather than the other way around — and expanded on that considerably after we caught up with him later.
I finally touched the MSI Claw 8 AI Plus.
The Intel Lunar Lake handheld, on sale now, looks and feels SO much better than the original, and I hear it performs far better, too.
A look inside the Lenovo Legion Go S.
Lenovo sent Dave2D an entire pre-production unit of the soon-to-be Steam-ified Legion Go S, complete with its Lenovo-exclusive AMD Z2 Go chip, so he’s got the best look yet. You can see its full-length SSD slot here (with spacer for smaller drives) for easy upgrades.
He also ran early benchmarks that suggest it’ll surely have more performance than the Steam Deck. We both agree it won’t be a battery life champ.
Valve will officially let you install SteamOS on other handhelds as soon as this April
Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge
SteamOS was always supposed to be bigger than Valve’s own Steam Deck, and 2025 is the year it finally expands. Not only will Lenovo ship the first third-party SteamOS handheld this May, Valve has now revealed it will let you install a working copy of SteamOS on other handhelds even sooner than that.
Pierre-Loup Griffais, one of the lead designers on the Steam Deck and SteamOS, tells me a beta for other handhelds “is slated to ship after March sometime,” and that you might discover the OS just starts working properly after that happens!
Up close with the SteamOS-powered Lenovo Legion Go S.
Sorry I couldn’t provide any performance or battery impressions, though: this unit has an old Z1 Extreme chip inside, no intensive games on display, not even a Portal 2 savegame.
Lenovo’s officially making a Legion Go 2, too.
The Legion Go S is the immediate successor to the Legion Go handheld, minus the detachable gamepads / mouse / kickstand and plus a SteamOS option. But a Legion Go 2 is coming sometime in 2025, Lenovo has announced.
Specs include Ryzen Z2 Extreme, an 8.8-inch 144Hz OLED screen with VRR (!), and a big 74Wh battery. This one didn’t turn on, but the grips are definitely comfier!
1/5Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge
Lenovo Legion Go S official: $499 buys the first authorized third-party SteamOS handheld
Lenovo is trying an experiment. In May, it will officially become the very first company outside of Valve to ship a handheld gaming PC with the Steam Deck’s wonderfully pick-up-and-play SteamOS instead of Microsoft Windows. And at $499, it’ll be a true Steam Deck rival, joining it as one of the lower-priced PC handhelds you can buy.
That handheld will be the 1.6-pound Lenovo Legion Go S, a new and improved version of the company’s eight-inch handheld that ditches the Nintendo Switch-like detachable gamepads and kickstand for a lighter and more traditional design, with a sculpted grip that felt supremely comfortable in my hands.
Asus just announced the world’s first Thunderbolt 5 eGPU
This smoky black translucent box isn’t a gaming PC — instead, it might be the most powerful single-cable portable docking station ever conceived. When you plug your laptop or handheld into the just-announced 2025 Asus XG Mobile, it promises to add the power of Nvidia’s top-flight GeForce RTX 5090 mobile chip, and up to 140 watts of electricity, and two monitors, and a USB and SD-card-reading hub, and 5Gbps ethernet simultaneously.
That’s because it’s the world’s first* Thunderbolt 5 external graphics card and one of the first Thunderbolt 5 docks, using the new 80 gigabit per second bidirectional link to do more things with a single cable than we’ve ever seen before.
No, Valve isn’t working with GPD to bring SteamOS to its handheld.
Valve just squashed its second Steam Deck-adjacent rumor in one day. “We’re not currently working with GPD on official SteamOS support,” Valve designer Lawrence Yang tells The Verge.
Intel brought a big honking stereo 3D handheld gaming PC to CES 2025.
It’s co-developed with Tencent, it’s called the Sunday Dragon, and it’s absolutely huge with an 11-inch autostereoscopic screen (like the Nintendo 3DS but massive). I nearly dropped it trying to remove its detachable controllers.
The 3D popped to life just fine for me, and while the heft gave me pause, the grips are sculpted nicely. Lunar Lake inside.
AMD’s Z2 handheld gaming chips are official — and not coming to a Steam Deck near you
AMD has just officially announced its full lineup of Ryzen Z2 chips for handheld gaming PCs like the Steam Deck, after a brief tease this fall — but as of today, it’s pretty muddy who they’re for or what they’re going to do for handheld PC gaming.
First off, although AMD told journalists in a pre-recorded briefing that Valve’s Steam Deck, Lenovo Legion Go, and Asus ROG Ally lineups would all feature the new chips, it’s not clear that’s actually true.
Acer made an enormous 11-inch gaming handheld
Image: Acer
Acer is announcing two new Nitro Blaze gaming handhelds at CES 2025, and one of them, the Nitro Blaze 11, is truly giant with a massive 10.95-inch screen.
Seriously, it’s huge — just look at this photo of a person holding it! It’s absurd!
Ayaneo 3: could the “world’s first modular handheld” solve the great joystick debate?
It’s probably going to cost a buttload of money, but I’m seriously intrigued: could this modular design let some of us get symmetrical sticks, others offset Xbox-style sticks, and still others enjoy touchpads or extra buttons instead?
Still, looks like you’ll have to “pick two” at a time — while the Steam Deck offers dual touchpads, dual sticks and D-pad simultaneously.
The Steam Deck has finally been surpassed — by a fork of Valve’s own experience
An Asus ROG Ally X, running Bazzite. It looks just like SteamOS, because they share an interface.
The first time I installed Bazzite on a Windows gaming handheld, I laughed. It looked like such a blatant clone of Valve’s Steam Deck interface. Its many bugs kept me at bay.
Now, an Asus ROG Ally X running Bazzite has all but replaced the Steam Deck in my life. For the moment, it may be the best handheld your time and money can buy — because it brings 90 percent of the Deck’s ease of use to the Ally’s more powerful hardware, larger 80 watt-hour battery, and variable refresh rate screen. Depending on the game, it can even offer better performance and battery life than the very same handheld with Windows. I’ve been testing it for five months, and I’ve rarely looked back.
Valve will be Lenovo’s ‘special guest’ at just-announced gaming handheld event
Image: Evan Blass (X)
“The future of gaming handhelds is coming to CES ‘25 and you have a front row seat!” the email in my inbox exclaims.
Let me translate: it looks like Lenovo just tacitly confirmed it will announce its first SteamOS handheld in Las Vegas on or before January 7th, 2025. We’re expecting it to be the Steam button equipped Legion Go S that leaker Evan Blass revealed last week.
Leak: Lenovo’s larger Legion handheld adds OLED and keeps the detachable mouse
Earlier today, Evan Blass revealed an unannounced Lenovo Legion Go S handheld gaming PC with an extremely intriguing twist: a Steam button that suggests it could be the first third-party SteamOS handheld, and thus the first true competitor to the Steam Deck.
But that handheld gaming PC apparently won’t be alone: Blass just provided The Verge with these images of a new, larger Lenovo Legion Go as well.
The first batch of refurbished Steam Deck OLED is already sold out.
I may have hinted to my family that I wanted an OLED upgrade as my one Christmas present this year... wonder if they saw it in time?
English (US) ·