valve: Here’s when Valve’s ‘Nintendo Switch-rival’ handheld gaming PC may start shipping

NEW DELHI: Valve had announced Steam Deck, its first-ever handheld gaming device last year in July. The gaming PC, seen as the rival to the Nintendo Switch, was supposed to start shipping from December last year to the United States, Canada, European Union, and the United Kingdom, with plans to launch the gaming PC in more regions. Which, by the way, did not happen as planned. But now, we may have some idea about when the device may start shipping, thanks to an update on the Steam Community site.
The blogpost says: “First and foremost, we’re on track to ship Steam Deck on time. Global pandemic, supply issues, and shipping issues notwithstanding, it looks like we’ll be able to start getting these out the door by the end of February.”
If you need a refresher, the Steam Deck is a portable device by Valve Corporation through which you can access all the games in your Steam library and play. You just need to power the gaming PC on, sign in with your Steam credentials and start playing. Steam Deck comes with a dock and can even connect to monitors and PCs. It has a Zen 2 + RDNA 2 architecture and Valve claims that it can run the latest AAA games. The device features a 7-inch capacitive LCD touchscreen, a trackpad and gyros. The touchscreen has a 1280 x 800 pixels resolution with a 16:10 aspect ratio and has a refresh rate of 60Hz, with 400 nits brightness. Valve says that the display uses an “optically bonded LCD for enhanced readability.”
The Steam Deck comes with 16 GB LPDDR5 RAM (5500 MT/s) and in three storage options: 64GB, 256GB and 512GB with microSD support. It runs SteamOS 3.0 (Arch-based).