Good news, handheld-gaming holiday shoppers: Valve just dropped a delightful surprise. The year-plus-old Steam Deck has a new version with a larger OLED display, arriving Nov. 16. I’ve been using it for the last couple of days, and it’s really good.
Handheld gaming consoles have been back on the rise lately, not just with the Nintendo Switch, indie handhelds and the upcoming PlayStation Portal, but in PC gaming too. To compete with the Steam Deck, the Asus Rog Ally and Lenovo Legion Go bring Windows-based handheld gamers even more options. The new OLED Steam Deck update starts at $549 and the original LCD-based models remain on sale at reduced prices, starting at $349.
Comparing the new OLED Steam Deck next to the original at home, I saw some clear advantages. The new Steam Deck has a 7.4-inch HDRÂ OLED display that, while still the same 1,200×800-pixel resolution, looks far more vivid and colorful. Playing games on the OLED Steam Deck gives me the same feeling I have playing on the Nintendo Switch OLED: I don’t want to go back to the original and its LCD screen. The larger display also leads to a sleeker, thinner frame bezel on a similar-sized chassis.
The new OLED Steam Deck also has a larger battery, boasting up to 50% more battery life. I haven’t experienced what that actually adds up to in everyday use yet, but that’s welcome news. Even more surprisingly, the handheld is slightly lighter. Storage configurations have been boosted, too: There’s now a 1TB Steam Deck option, in addition to a 512GB model. The 512GB version is $549, while the 1TB version is $649 — which is pretty fantastic, since these were basically the prices of the Steam Deck higher-config models previously. $649 now nets you twice the storage, an OLED display, better battery and a lot of other improvements.
Valve is selling previous LCD models at a discount going…
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