Valve has been ramping up production of its Steam Deck handheld gaming PC throughout the year, and while there were long wait times when the portable computer went on sale earlier this year, the wait times are getting shorter and shorter.
Meanwhile other companies making handheld gaming computers are releasing new details about upcoming devices. GPD is showing off the backlit keyboard on the upcoming GPD Win 4, as well as revealing that it will be one of the first devices of its type to have a display that has a native landscape orientation (small screens often default to portrait mode). And One Netbook says its first ONEXPLAYER handheld with an AMD Ryzen 7 6800U chip is on the way.
Here’s a roundup of recent tech news from around the web.
Some more good news: We’ve beaten our own production estimates yet again! As of today we’ve sent invitations to everyone left with a Q3 (July-September) reservation, and are getting a head start on Q4: https://t.co/rsWv4K1sA7 pic.twitter.com/IC0mkiSUZ6
— Steam Deck (@OnDeck) September 19, 2022
One Netbook teases an upcoming ONEXPLAYER handheld gaming PC with an AMD Ryzen 7 6800U processor, joining a growing number of announced handhelds with this 8-core, 16-thread chip featuring 12-core RDNA 2 graphics. https://t.co/nmHaM1Jdn1
— Liliputing (@liliputingnews) September 19, 2022
The backlit on physical keyboard.#gpdwin4 pic.twitter.com/5Mv5WPXsgO
— GPD Game Consoles (@softwincn) September 19, 2022
Wow! Native landscape! That’s a pretty huge feature. (Well if you were mainlining Windows exclusively)
For those unaware older games on Windows DX8 or older need to a wrapper to display correctly.
Even Steam Deck has a portrait based display. https://t.co/AoSOh2BWD3
— Cary Golomb (@carygolomb) September 16, 2022
The iPhone 14 is the easiest iPhone to repair in years, because it can be opened from the front and the back, so you might not have to disassemble the whole thing to repair one part. But the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max are as hard to open as ever. https://t.co/Mb5KQDIOvt pic.twitter.com/6XfJOuDgDt
— Liliputing (@liliputingnews) September 19, 2022
#RISCV development board compatible with OpenHarmony 3.0 for #education in #China that borrows its design from the BBC Micro:bit board. #visualprogramming #STEM https://t.co/IlstXSBQ7e
— CNX Software (@cnxsoft) September 19, 2022
Looks like the Pixel 7’s Tensor G2 chip has the same CPU core structure as the G1, but slightly higher clock speeds and a move to a 4nm process for maybe a 10% speed boost. The Mali-G710 GPU should bring 20-35% better performance. https://t.co/VG6YlQkgCW
— Liliputing (@liliputingnews) September 19, 2022
Chinese chip designer Loongson appears to be working on support for Linux laptops with LoongArch processors. Don’t expect them to find them outside of China anytime soon though. https://t.co/6CvWDGtLk9
— Liliputing (@liliputingnews) September 19, 2022
Weekly GNU-like Mobile Linux Update (37/2022): #libadwaita 1.2, #Sxmo 1.11.1 and much more https://t.co/Nlw60L7uUm#linuxmobile #pinephone #librem5
— LINux on MOBile (@linmobblog) September 18, 2022
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I feel like the Steam Deck is now a mainstream product. Most of it’s rough edges from it’s pre-release and early days have been polished.
Valve would be wise to do a November campaign and manufacture and sell as many units as possible aimed at the mainstream “console buying” people. Just in time for Christmas. I think selling an additional 10 Million units in that short period is definitely possible and in line with other consoles.