After being revealed early in February, the upcoming Orange Pi Neo that will come with Manjaro Linux now has a price, and there will be multiple versions of it although we still don't exactly have a clear release date.
Most of the handheld benchmarks have been 3% or 4% higher compared to the Steamdeck at 15 watts, which often is a 1 to 4 FPS difference. This would explain why Valve isn't in a hurry for a Steamdeck 2. If you plan of playing on battery, then that is what you'll probably running around that if you plan on playing a while. The main advantage of these newer chips is when used plugged in.
The Steam Deck is already a couple of years old, so it's not that hard to do. This thing has better specs across the board, with even the base model having twice the cores and threads as the Deck.
Exactly. That's what nearly all of the competitors fail at. Sure, they might have more performance, are slimmer, have this feature or that advantage, but when it comes to actually getting games to work with them and the user experience, none are as good as Valve's handheld.
Avoid the OLED model (due to the danger of burn-in) and get it. It's a great device for portable gaming, both for games running directly on it and emulation up to and including Switch. It's fantastic for rediscovering games in your library. Just be aware that the slick user interface gets replaced by bog-standard (and extremely unpleasant to use on the small display) Linux clunkiness the moment you need to tweak anything outside of Steam and games.
This is terrible advice. The OLED model is better across the board. The risk of burn-in is also wildly overstated.
The only reason to get the original model would be price.
Don’t get me wrong, I have an original and it’s great. I don’t consider the OLED model enough of an upgrade to justify the extra cost but I wouldn’t think twice if I was getting my first.
Steamdeck performance is still pretty good though, imo the most important factor in the handheld pc market is battery life. If games take a 5% hit to performance for an extra 40 minutes of battery life, the tradeoff becomes obvious to me.