Steam Deck Update

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A few days ago Valve in a somewhat unusual move posted a partial teardown video of the Steam Deck, in particular showing off the battery and M.2 SSD, although the video was filled with various amusing warnings such as “taking out the screws will permanently weaken it”, which as any competent person will know is essentially bullshit, still I can’t blame them for it, as your average user has the intellect of a baked potato and shouldn’t be encouraged.

The overall design and build quality seems very good, in particular the controls appear to be modular which is going to make replacement easy, Valve also suggest they will be providing replacement parts, although this remains to be seen, I have no doubt there will be numerous third party options in any case.

Updated FAQ

Valve also posted an updated FAQ on the Steam Deck website, some things of particular note are it can be used as a game controller and includes a decent 1.5m USB-C charging cable, the screen is also 10 finger multitouch (although I have no idea why you’d put 10 fingers on it), the rest of it is fairly obvious stuff such as dual boot support, etc.

Developer Release

Valve have also been shipping early units to a number of game developers, as such there is a decent bit of game footage floating around on Twitter, it has been confirmed by at least one developer that a five hour battery life can be expected from a moderately demanding game, this is a good sign that most players will squeeze at least 4 hours out of it and much more with light games.

Conclusion

We’re now under three months before the first release units ship, I’m hoping more details are released soon about Steam OS as I have yet to see the anti-cheat improvements promised for EAC and Battleeye, it would also be interesting to try out the new interface which will eventually replace the big picture mode.

If you’ve not already reserved then you’re pretty much out of luck, most if not all regions have slots later than Q2 2022.