Steam Deck OLED First Impressions: Full featured!
It is truly incredible.
In the world of the handheld PC, SteamOS is becoming more and more dominant. The Steam Deck and the new Lenovo Legion Go S have SteamOS installed on them and it is definitely the more refined experience. Valve was gracious enough to send out a unit of their incredible Steam Deck OLED so I could take a look back to see what handhelds like the ROG Ally and the MSI Claw are missing with SteamOS.
In this article, I will be only diving into what my first impressions of the handheld PC are after unboxing it. The Steam Deck OLED comes packaged with a 45W power adapter and a very nice hard-shell carrying case. This is such a great inclusion because the whole purpose of the device is to use it on the go, so having the protection to do so included in the box is such a great quality-of-life improvement.
Upon first grabbing it out of the carrying case, I can tell that this handheld PC was meant for someone with larger hands, and for someone like me, who does have larger hands, it is great. It feels like my hands can just slot into the controller grips. That won't be the case for everyone, but still.
It is somewhat heavy at around 1.475 pounds, but it is less-so too heavy, and more just nicely dense. It feels like I can really control what is going on in the game, but the heaviness is difficult at times. My hands did strain after holding it for an hour or so, but this is common among handhelds.
Immediately upon launching the device, the UI truly is great. It is responsive (especially at 90 Hz), familiar to Steam users, and delightfully modern. The fact that it suggests the games that you have played recently on your Steam account to download is a great feature add and helps users to just get into what they want to play. However, not all games will run on SteamOS, but that will be tested later on in my full review article.
That kind of helps to sum up my first impressions of this handheld PC: a wonderful device, but with an asterisk among some things (occasionally). We will have to see how this plays out later on down the line with the Steam Deck OLED.
Steam Deck OLED provided by Valve for review.
