Valve’s Steam Deck is a powerful, flexible gaming handheld that feels great and lets you take your games on the go. Just don’t expect it to last too long, and know that some games may not work perfectly out of the box. It would be an understatement to say that PC gaming has seen a bit of a resurgence in the last few years, in spite of ongoing GPU supply issues and price gouging. So it’s not entirely surprising that, players jumped at the opportunity to play their favorite games on what appeared to be a high-quality handheld device. After all, previous handheld PCs like the Aya Neo aren’t exactly household names, and usually cost much more.

The build quality is strong and solid, and the anti-glare display is beautiful. I don’t think anyone will be surprised that the battery life isn’t stellar for most titles. But what will compel some people and shock others is how much of a PC this is. Some of that comes from the fact that Valve is still tinkering on the software side, and based on the improvements I’ve seen in my time with the device, I expect it to seem more fully baked soon. Yet it’s also due to the fact that there is so much you can change, and how there are little quirks you’ll have to live with or try to fix.

Valve’s handheld is an imposing, black plastic machine, measuring 11.73 inches wide, 4.6 inches tall and 1.93 inches deep (298 x 117 x 49 mm). A standard Nintendo Switch is 9.4 x 4 x 0.5 inches, so this is far longer and thicker. Still it’s much smaller than the best gaming laptops.

• Processor. AMD APU. CPU: Zen 2 4c/8t, 2.4-3.5GHz (up to 448 GFlops FP32) GPU: 8 RDNA 2 CUs, 1.0-1.6GHz (up to 1.6 TFlops FP32) …
• RAM. 16 GB LPDDR5 on-board RAM (5500 MT/s quad 32-bit channels)
• Storage. 64 GB eMMC (PCIe Gen 2 x1) 256 GB NVMe SSD (PCIe Gen 3 x4 or PCIe Gen 3 x2*)