The Steam Deck is the BEST Handheld Console. Fight me.

I’ve had my Steam Deck for about a month, and I’ve come to the frankly inescapable conclusion that it is the best handheld console you can buy right now. I’m sure some of you will disagree with me. That’s fine, but at least listen to why I think it is first eh? Oh you’ve already left a 3,000 word essay in the comments? Ah ok nevermind then. For the rest of you though, here’s why!

The Steam Deck is the definitive example of a handheld games system. I had a Gameboy Advance, a PSP, and my wife has a Switch Lite. I’ve been using portable consoles for over two decades – as I’m sure many of you have. The thing is, this can play any of the games you played as a kid. Want to play Pokemon Emerald – my childhood game of choice? Great, use Emudeck to install the emulator, copy the ROM and get cracking. Want to play PSP games? Same deal. And yes, even Switch games. It’s all there. I think I’ve spent more time playing emulated games on this than I have normal Steam games! Being able to hand the Deck to my wife to play the original Gamecube version of Animal Crossing – something she can’t play unless we buy a Gamecube, then somehow adapt it to work with a modern TV, then only play it while at home. Being able to have essentially a hundred different consoles in your pocket, on top of a decently capable gaming PC, is something I could have only dreamed of as a kid.

Then there’s the outright performance. While it’s not exactly 4090 levels of performance (it’s actually smaller than a 4090, funnily enough), it’s enough to play any game I’d actually want to play on a device like this. Almost any indie title works flawlessly – I can highly recommend Absolute Drift and Art of Rally by the way, stunning games – and even larger titles like No Mans Sky runs mostly fine too. I did have to turn the settings down on that to get a decent experience, but the fact I can be blasting around the universe on a handheld device at all is incredible. While I certainly wouldn’t mind more power – and a faster Zen 3 CPU would have been great too especially for emulation – I’ve not found a title where I felt it actively lacked enough power to play it comfortably.

One of the most unique benefits of the Steam Deck is actually its internals. While I’m not going to get my hopes up, with how modular and repairable Valve has made the Steam Deck, I wouldn’t be overly surprised to find out they’ll make an upgraded motherboard you can swap into the existing shell to upgrade APUs. Again, I don’t want to get my hopes up, but with how they’ve clearly gone out of their way to make it upgradable and repairable, I’d love to see it. The fact the joysticks are on their own little PCBs and just need three screws and a ribbon cable removed to replace them is literally industry leading. They didn’t need to do that, but they did anyway. They sell replacement parts on iFixit’s store so if you smash your screen or your joysticks start drifting, replacement parts are cheap and accessible. Hell, they even come with the tools you’ll need to replace the parts! That’s pretty unparalleled.

On my last video with the Deck a number of people said they think it’s too big, and “it’s not pocket sized”. Like.. yeah? It’s not meant to be pocket sized. A Switch light fits in my pocket. It’s also a woefully underpowered console that’s too small for me to comfortably use, and the screen is literally smaller than my phone screen. The Deck’s screen – while imperfect for sure – is large enough that I can hold it at a comfortable distance and it’s contoured shape makes it actually comfortable for me to game on for hours. The panel isn’t perfect – mine actually has a bit of backlight bleed around the top edge, and as plenty of people have reported before it’s not the most vibrant or colour accurate. But… I don’t care. When actually gaming on it I do not notice. Yes, I’d love it if it had an OLED panel instead, and I’d love to see someone offer a drop-in replacement for that, but I can’t say it’s hindering my gaming experience while actually playing, and that’s what matters.

It does have its fair share of problems – it’s far from perfect – like the battery life. On the most demanding games you can expect an hour or two max of battery life, which isn’t exactly amazing. Although, if I’m being honest, especially for emulated titles or indie games, I’m getting four to six hours on a charge, and I’m never far enough away from a plug socket that I can’t charge it up. I’m also impressed with how quickly it charges. It was at 34% last night when my wife was playing Animal Crossing, I put it on charge while we had dinner, then when I went to get it again after eating it was at 84% and happily played the rest of the night on that charge.

A number of people also pointed out the fan as being a problem – although as I understand it that was an issue with one of the early batches of Decks, as mine has no issues at all. You can also buy a replacement fan from iFixit for £25. Even still, the fan isn’t exactly the quietest thing and in more demanding titles you do notice it, but for stuff like emulation it barely kicks in. You can also enable the new fan control profile in the settings (I think it’s on by default anyway) for a better experience. Actually, on the note of that software setting, I’ve been remarkably impressed with how Valve has improved the deck since its initial launch. While I didn’t get to experience those launch day jitters, I’m really impressed with how seamless the user experience on the deck actually is. There are still some hiccups I’ve experienced, but none that can’t be fixed with a restart.

The final point I want to make is arguably the most important. This is THE Steam Deck. Sure, you can buy similar systems from Aya or GPD or countless others, but the popularity of the Steam Deck outweighs any technical benefits of those other systems. There’s a reason why everyone and their dog has a Mazda MX-5 as their track car. It’s popular, which means people are making stuff for it, which makes it easier to get into and make it great, which makes more people get one. The cycle applies to the Steam Deck. There’s so much development, both of software and hardware, specifically for the Steam Deck. Sabrent just launched a Steam Deck specific dock, EmuDeck is a script that makes emulating games a seamless experience, and there’s countless other projects and tools people have made specifically for the Deck. Hell, the Gulikit joysticks I installed – which I’ve had no problems with by the way – are a complete PCB that are just available on Amazon. That level of development and ecosystem creates a significant advantage over any other systems.

Even the pricing and the fact they include a top quality carry case is astonishing. It’s an amazing bit of kit and I can’t recommend it enough. Buying the 64GB model and sticking a larger drive in worked just fine for me, although even the 256GB is still a pretty good deal. Great job Valve, and I look forward to reading the horrifically mean comments I can only assume are already in the comments section.