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I dont know why he is not willing to spend more than 150 USD, but there are always some games that may work on those very limited specs.

Although he does not need to be a woman in order to have feminine traits.

I do not think chinese devices are built with bad quality, in general not any worse than most of the other devices available elsewhere, including Steam Deck. Without excessive US sanctions, i guess Huawei would already be ahead of Apple on the phones, yet this is not over yet and some other companies are stepping in.

The Steam Service is only "good" in certain countries including US and EU, but there are many countries the Steam service is not any better than on those "chinese devices". Fact is, in my country i can not even get a Steam Deck using a official channel... because not officially available and no direct support at all.

I still prefer not to have a warranty case at all because on almost any device it could become a lengthy process... including Steam. I do not share your "trust" as i know different experiences on a lot of other cases. In general the industry and consumer rights are in a bad shape. Many people are simply sending their defective device to a repair shop and prefer not to deal with the bad RMA process at all.

Same for Steam OS, it is designed to make anything obsolete except the stuff from their own store as this is what this device has been built for... in order to attach customers to their store.

The only good thing is, since there is a Linux compatible Steam OS, the Linux support has been raised dramatically... so the Linux community is obviously thankful for it as they was in a high demand of more support. Now they can emulate Wine much better, thanks to the Proton infos.

However, in general Windows based handhelds still offer the biggest compatibility, and of course Steam is always spying on their users just as much as MS.

Everything, including Steam Deck, is just a prototype to me, nothing else. I does not even matter if the new Steam Deck may last 2 instead of 1 hour, this is still several times to less.

My impression is that you suffer a inferiority complex, because apparently overwhelmed by something else and now trying to restore your chunks of ego left by a massive wave of dead-thoughs, full of bloated ratings.

Or simply limit the power a handheld is able to use to 5-10 W dependable on the size of the battery and simply accepting the fact that a handhelds weakest spot is not cooling nor processing power, but a long lasting battery.

It is not forbidden to build a handheld with a bigger battery or a less hungry processor. In term it will become unable to play Cyberpunk, most likely it simply may not be able to play any PC game in a sufficient manner...

Yet there is still a potential on creating a better battery on the density term, not just by increasing the size; so there is still a open headroom.
Nope... in 6 years 4k is still a challenge for many mid range PCs at max settings and a handheld will never need more than 1080P. A game may exceed 100 GB very commonly, yet there is no reason to think it will be much higher. Your utopia is highly exaggerated. The upper edge may stay 200 GB or in other words 2 times a BD XL disc, as the industry is satisfied by this "potential". Usually only used on the "big franchise titles" and not a common thing, not even in 6 years at a new console generation and 2 further PC generations.

4k will finally become the standard, nowadays it is still 1080P, and 8k is just for some geeks, not any practical on everyday core gaming.

As my forum title says, I am a "she", not a "he".

And that's why many people carry powerbanks, even with 3d printed accessories to secure the powerbank to the Deck. Is not the most elegant solution and the wheight becames unbearable to hold in hands (is already too heavy) but is indeed a option.

The thing is, Steam OS has the tools to limit the output power of the SOC and you can limit to 5 or 10W. Heck, this is how mine is configured most of the time, along with other 3rd party tools to be able to play 8-10 hours on a single charge.

Is not feasible to use a battery with a bigger density and sell it to the masses (cost obvisouly), the same way is not feasible to use a bigger battery (as explained, its already too heavy).

It's not my utopia because I can't care less about the numbers game, quit caring a long time ago :) and of course it's highly exaggerated, that was my point and you miss it completely.
My point is that as long as there are high powered PC wasting 400W at the wall to play games, there can't be bettery powered devices doing the same at 15W, there's no magic in it. There's nothing wrong in having a low-medium power heater that can play games, the problem are not the pc's but expectations and magic wishing.

A good exemple to show what I mean is the Switch. It doesn't last 10H on a single charge on a typical Nintendo game but is also much smaller and probably 1/3 the wheight of the Deck, on much older technology (meaning it could last 10 or more hours). The games are still fun and decent looking, they are created and developed to a platform that is limited by nature, unlike many AAA (whatever that means) pc games that are tailored to computer 5 years in the future.

That attached image is reminding me of the Sega Game Gear, a handheld that *did* have major battery issues; in fact, I think the battery is the primary reason that handheld was not successful. (Compare it to the Game Boy; GB's graphics weren't as good or colorful, but at least you weren't constantly replacing the battery.)

If anyone likes a certain brand, try this and then decide. Unplug the battery and run the device from the wall outlet. If after 20 minutes of normal use, nothing happens to exhibit no abnormal behavior. That device is probably decent. If it fails? It is garbage, irregardless of brand.

Know your gear! Start with the basics. Oh and in case you are curious, almost all handhelds fail this test. They also intentionally lack cmos batteries. Gues 30 cents is to much.

OK
I do not usually take those titles to serious, sometimes pretty weird stuff written there and your profile is locked.
Maybe it works by using settings but this is simply not sufficient for some demanding titles. Perhaps if the SOC is at 15-20 W it may be able to tackle even demanding titles at 1080P@30 FPS, but it will need improvement on the battery still for 6-10 h of gameplay.

Power banks i do not generally enjoy in a "usual daily situation" but if i am traveling far from home for a week or more i always got powerbanks with me... as a emergency backup, not as a "battery extender" (just to valuable for it... you never know what happens and if it happens the power bank can save your day... on the phone, laptop... whatelse.)

Compared to the Switch it surely is huge but this is not only a battery issue, it simply is demanding in order to cool down a laptop-sized chip with up to 30 W TDP without a capable cooling system. In my mind it is simply not advanced enough in order to tackle all those PC games but i think those portable chips may become improved, along with the battery.

Only about 5-10% of all game got a very high demand, usually known as "franchise games" and they are usually tuned in order to use all or most of the resources available on PC and consoles. Nothing wrong with this, as the devs want to achieve the "best" experience possible. Usually, as soon as a new hardware is released, it does not take long making use of this new power... simply how stuff works. A cat and mouse game where the mouse will never be able to run away. However, the settings can be adjusted of course... so even weaker systems may get a chance.

Nintendo games may be fun but surely not decent looking by my standards... the lack of muscles unfortunately is taking away some of the atmospheric and clean picture. However, every human is different... on how they perceive the world. I can not stand blurry images... i get tears in my eyes if it happens... but some other people got no issues with.

PC games are not really tailored 5 year in the future if you use the "top notch-hardware", however... this hardware is rarely used.

Sega Game Gear passes this test, *provided* you buy the AC adapter (sold separately, IIRC, and it needs to be the proper one for your region's electricity).

My Ayaneo Slide is quote heavy (600g), but thanks to the tilted screen it's very comfortable to hold, the weight is not really an issue.
And yeah, thanks to the chipset, many games can be played with very low power, some I even run in desktop mode.

AC adapters these days accept all common electricity settings, unlike 20 years ago. Only thing that changes is the shape of the connectors.

But for some devices with new batteries you need to make sure that they support the right settings. In my case I learned that I need a 3 x 20V supply mode in order to charge the battery.

Owned one when they came out.

I was pointing out modern handhelds. Cheap quality components. No quality control and scummy business practice from manufacturers. Almost all modern handhelds lack decent power components. So it forces the user to buy a new device when the battery dies.

All smart cell phones have a similar design. Only a few have battery bypass. Those that do, may only function for some programs and not all.


On a side not, always make sure your laptops have a cmos bios battery. I always take my gear apart to see if anything needs repair from day1

Interesting... Just had a look at the Wikipedia article and a set of 6 AA batteries were eaten in 3-6 hours, holy crap, that was expensive at the time!

But as a side point, it kinda reinforce my view on keeping the expectation way lower than what the marketing teams want us to believe. A handheld that could play the Master System/Mega Drive games with pretty much the same hardware, could not be expected to last a lot of time on a set of batteries.

A bit of a rant more on the technical side: I am actually amazed on how the Game Gear manages to stay on pulling so much power from the batteries, the Voltage should sag so much under load that it must be very close to the device needed Voltage to stay on. they must had run 3 series and 2 parallel configuration. Poor people who bought old carbon-zinc and not the more expensive alkalines...

Cmos batteries are for keeping the bios active. Without a cmos battery, it can cause problems when your settings get reset every time the user turns on the machine.

All the modern handheld systems have these problems. As far as I know, all the modern handhelds lack a cmos battery. Whuch makes them all bad by default. Unless you are so wealthy you dont care about losing a $700+ machine.

Some may ask why not just use a memory system to avoid a capacitor or a battery? Because, it would be easy to hack any memory at a level, before the operating system. Thus a 30cent battery is a cheap and easy problem solver. But most handhelds(x86 especially) lack this and rely 100% on the primary battery. So if the primary battery is dead or unplugged. The device stops functioning, even when plugged into a wall outlet.

Your conclusion would be right if the default setting was bad.
But the BIOS updates you get from the manufacturer already contain the settings which the manufacturer thinks work best for the device.

The Ayaneo Slide for example comes with 8,16,32 and 64 GB RAM. They have a separate BIOS for every confituration.

I did change somthing, I increased the RAM clock, But it works fine with the default settings as well.

If you use a AMD reference BIOS it's a different thing, but I talked to some people who tried that with other devices and won't do so again, since they had constantly problems getting all the hardware to run. Maybe this IS caused by what you said, that the device sometimes is compleetely shut off without battery backup, which of course is pure speculation.

A second battery would be an option of course and probably a good idea for that one purpose. But then you need to give the user uncomplicated access to it without losing warranty. Also it does exactly the same job as the main battery does now, it's only a backup. And last but not least it takes valuable space which you can use for heat management.
So ... it's not really needed in the first place. And in case the main battery dies,the last thing on your mind are probably some BIOS settings anyway.Space is lost as well. So I'd say while a backup battery has undoubtly the advantage to save your settings in a worst case scenario, the disadvantages outweight the advantage very clearly.

The battery has 46Wh, the device uses around 10W by default, so when playing at 15W TDP you are fine for two hours. Most of the time I play below, since I use it for sidescrollers mostly.
The Ayaspace App is very nice indeed, I didn't really go into it however, mostly to enable or disable the mouse emulation, change power/heat configuration or so. To launch games, I use PlayNite.

A GPD Win would have been my second choice. I guess in the end it's a matter of taste. I wanted a compact handheld and the tiltable screen is just ace. I can balance it horizontally on my fingers while looking at the screen in a almost 90° angle. But I also would not have minded if the screen was 7" instead of 6".
The one thing I would have changed tho is the angle of the sides, which are kinda parallel. A trapeze shape like gamepads have would have been better. Now when I play, the slide rests on two of my fingers on each hand while the palms stand a bit off. Would have been cool to hold it like a game pad.

And no, I didn't mean 3A x 20V. (should have left the "3" out). I tried a weaker charger, it had 2 x 35W output. I assumed it would charge the Slide anyway when it was turned off, but it simply ignored it. I was told the Slide uses a battery that is organized in 3 x 20 Volt units, being charged at up to 5W each (the Slide only charges at ~15W, but can use the additional 50W of the charger for running games at the same time). so the used charger needs to support certain modes. With a 65W charger one is at the safe side however, those usually support all modes.