All of these steam deck competitors all try to sell the same thing, higher resolutions and more power. The problem that valve understands is that you can’t just slap any SOC in a handheld PC and expect good battery life versus performance. The only way to combat the lower battery life is a bigger battery or make your chip use less power. The new AMD 8000 SOCs are promising, but I think the only company to make a real meaningful handheld PC is valve, they chose the perfect chip for their needs.
The OS of the Steam deck is purpose-built for the same task that the Steam Deck is built for; most of the supposed competitors are running Windows.
Windows isn’t known for efficiency, and a lot of the software that would give windows an edge doesn’t really line up with the goals of a gaming hand-held.
But that has nothing to do with the hardware. If the chip is more powerful and using more power, it’s not going to last as long on a battery. You could argue about performance modes and whatnot but ultimately it’s down to the chip the handheld is running. I would bet the battery life on a deck running windows is very close to the battery life running steamOS.
On the contrary, I don’t think Valve understands that it’s possible to simply turn down the resolution and frame rates. But you can’t turn them up if the hardware doesn’t support it.
And in my case I’m usually close to an outlet and/or streaming from a desktop PC so these are not concerns for me.
