Bought one of these during the recent sale. It is a marvel. I had been thinking of waiting for an eventual v2, but it's honestly so cool today that it's not worth waiting. For me the main "wow" moments:

1. The first party, deck verified steam experience is super smooth, feeling just like a game console. It's like a switch with a deeper library and better controls. I love the community contributed control layouts as well.

2. The hardware itself is fantastic. The controls are great for both gaming and light desktop computing. Great feel in the hands, pleasant screen for gaming, and really just a much more comfortable experience than sitting at a desk or playing on the TV. It feels like curling up with a good book.

3. Linux with great windows compatibility layer out of the box. You pop it over into desktop mode and you have a Linux machine with ability to run most of the software out there for windows. You plug in a usb-c hub and you have a full desktop, keyboard mouse experience. And if you really have the need, you can dual boot into windows.

4. An insanely helpful community. Tons of knowledge out there for getting it to do anything you can dream of. So many people hacking on their favorite game to improve performance or play experience. Many folks writing auto-config scripts for anything from turning it into a retro gaming powerhouse to tweaking the swap file performance characteristics.

rozal

I never understood the steam deck.

Most smartphones are much more powerful in terms are hardware, better screen technology (OLED and high refresh rates)

More importantly, you can easily stream games on to them.

So why on god earth is everyone so excited about a crumby screen that can play a few games on medium settings?

sleepybrett

Let me know when you get mainline AAA windows games running on your smartphone. Steamdeck does this through a software layer called proton. I guess you could try to port this to android or ios ... https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton

The hardware may be more powerful on your phone (but it probably isn't). The screen is probably better but the steamdeck's screen is pretty great to my eyes.

I can also easily stream games to my steamdeck just like my phone, and sometimes do.. however that really only works if I am on the same local network unless I want to take a huge video compression quality hit.

I can take my steamdeck on an airplane and play any game that doesn't require a really reliable internet connection (or games without that requirement of course). But if you are trying to stream games, have fun with that I guess.