Black Friday creeps in early, a new OLED Steam Deck and more
Yes, it's a little early to start thinking about holiday gifts, at least if you're waiting for the annual Black Friday sales to start...or is it? Doing a quick survey of popular shopping sites, Best Buy, Walmart and Target are already hawking Black Friday deals. Amazon is a little more low-key, with a soft launch for what it calls "Holiday Deals" right now.
This echoes what I've said in previous years, that Black Friday and its awkwardly named cousin, Cyber Monday, have expanded like an out-of-control lab experiment, growing to fill every nook and cranny of the post-Halloween season. Now, the greater continent I sometimes call "Black Friday and beyond" really stretches from the beginning of November to about the second week of December, after which the shopping craze does die down a bit.
Except for last-minute procrastinators, of course, who, at that point, usually settle for gift cards or gift subscriptions. The last two weeks of December are definitely a good time to be in the Hulu gift card or Fortnite V-Bucks business...
It's no secret that I think the Steam Deck, Valve's handheld gaming PC, is an amazing piece of hardware. Even though the first-gen version from early 2022 looked and felt like a prototype, it finally cracked the code for handheld PC gaming, especially if you were willing to tinker with the settings and get into its Linux-based desktop mode and install new software.
Just in time for the holidays, there's a new version of the Steam Deck. Valve isn't calling it a second-gen device, instead positioning it as a perfected version of the original. The biggest change is swapping out the original LCD screen for a slightly larger OLED display, which makes a huge difference. Note that the actual CPU/GPU combo is the same (but more power-efficient), so you shouldn't expect better in-game performance from the hardware.
Here's what's different:
New 7.4-inch OLED display (up from a 7-inch LCD)
90Hz refresh rate (up from 60Hz)
Bigger 50Whr battery (up from 40Whr)
Wi-Fi 6E
Slight tweaks to the thumbsticks and touchscreen response
Same size, but a hair lighter
Battery life should be much better because of the bigger battery, some tweaks to the AMD APU design and how efficient OLED screens can be. But the outer chassis remains the same, so your cases and kickstands should all still work. It's still also got that big, clunky feel of the original, but as a first-gen Steam Deck user, I guess I've gotten used to it.
In my brief hands-on time with the system, the screen just blows me away, and SteamOS still plays most Steam games more smoothly than Windows-based handhelds like the Asus Ally and new Lenovo Legion Go, even though those systems have more advanced hardware.
Stay tuned for more on the new OLED Steam Deck, which is now jumping to the top of my holiday gaming gift suggestion list.
I really appreciated this Verge article on the long and tangled history of SEO folks and the outsize impact they've had on the internet. The real-life stories of SEO pioneers who found ways to trick early search engines were interesting. Still, the greater point is one that my peers and I have started to acknowledge publicly—the never-ending SEO arms race has made Google less useful over time.
Even now, we all know to add the year to a Google search in hopes of finding some slightly more useful information (like "best mesh wi-fi systems, 2023") or add "reddit" to try and find actual ideas and suggestions from real people, not professional commerce writers. Of course, the SEO people also know those tricks, too, so they're mostly useless at this point. I still see articles I wrote years ago for CNET pop up with a fresh date stamp as if they had a clone of me chained up in a basement somewhere, cranking out holiday gift guides.
So you're not imagining it; the internet is getting worse, search/Google is less useful, and there's not much agreement over what to do about it.
Ironically, the current "big bad," artificial intelligence, is proving more helpful than harmful, especially for search. I can go to ChatGPT or Bard with a plain English query: How do I do X? What do I need for Y? I'll often get a plain English answer (hopefully not hallucinated), which is much preferable to wading through dozens of links filled with fluff, shopping buttons and awkward rephrasing of my question in H2 tags.
The Steam Deck from Valve was a surprise hit, and there's a new version on the way (see above). The Switch from Nintendo is an obvious hit. Put the two together, and you have the Lenovo Legion Go, another entrant in the handheld gaming PC category, this time combining the Windows platform of the Asus Ally with the removable side controllers from the Switch.
I previewed this new gaming device a while back, and now I finally have one in hand to test. Its biggest selling point, besides the Switch-like pop-off controllers, is a big 8.8-inch high-res screen with a speedy 144Hz refresh rate. But that's also its biggest problem. I loved the big screen, but the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme chip (combining the CPU and GPU together) just can't handle running modern games at very high resolutions and very high frame rates on top of running Windows 11.
Fortunately, you can go into the system settings in Lenovo's overlay software and knock the system resolution down to 1,920x1,200 and the refresh rate down to 60Hz. Doing that and switching the power settings to performance mode (also in the Lenovo system software), I got much better performance. Dead Space (2023) ran at around 40fps most of the time, Baldur's Gate 3 ran smoothly, and I even went back to my 2022 favorite, Marvel's Midnight Suns, which is a great match for a handheld gaming PC, especially with the larger screen. My only total washout so far has been Starfield, which crashes almost immediately. Hopefully, there's a fix coming for that.
Detailed benchmarks and more hands-on impressions to come.
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