I’ve been aware of the Steamdeck for a while, but it’s not been available in my country so I haven’t been paying it much attention. Recently I became aware of the existence of other types of handheld gaming PCs and before long, I had one:
This is a GPD Win 3, the i7 model. To be honest, I barely know what an i7 is - I stopped paying attention to computer specs in the late 90s and I have been happy that way for many years. Essentially what this thing is is a PC that’s shaped like a Switch - it’s about the same height and width, though twice as thick. Plus, it has this:
Yep, Windows 11. Oh, also a keyboard. The keyboard is a bit naff, to be honest. Sometimes I use the on-screen touch keyboard instead, to save on working the sliding mechanism too much. Anyway, the main controls are the game pad bits on either side - it’s got two sticks, a d-pad, start and select, four face buttons, and two shoulders on each side. Plus a fingerprint sensor for unlocking it and a tiny button dedicated to bringing up the windows Xbox interface which I’ll probably try to remap. On the left side of the console is a switch to go between controller and mouse mode - in mouse mode the right stick moves the mouse, the shoulder buttons do the clicks (sadly, not the way I’d choose - L1 is left click, L2 middle button, R1 is right click, and R2 increases movement speed. I’d rather have left and right click on R1 and R2 respectively which would make it easier to use with one hand and free up my left for the keyboard). The d-pad and face buttons get allocated to the scroll wheel, HOME and END, and the arrow keys. It basically works but it’s not spectacular, and I’ll probably look to set up a controller-based launcher for when I’m just using it to play games. Though I may also use this thing for other PC stuff. I’m pretty sure it’s a lot more powerful than my decade old desktop.
Here’s the dock - the base unit has one USB-A socket at the top and a USB-C socket (or thunderbolt? I haven’t kept up with sockets, either) at the bottom, through which the dock can connect power, HDMI, and more USBs. This was useful for example when I needed to connect a USB stick with a large casing that would have stopped me from sliding up to get to the keyboard. Also good for hooking up to the TV. The built in screen is 720p, less than some of the competing models, but high enough that I’ve turned up the text size in windows to be able to see things clearly.
Also visible here are the air inlet/outlets - air goes in through the vents in the back and goes out through the ones at the top. I often rest this thing on my leg when I’m using it and block the intake, hopefully that won’t cause too many problems. There are also a couple of extra customisable buttons on the back, the slightly lighter coloured bumpy bits near the edges. By default one of these is ESC and the other is CTRL-ALT-DEL. I’ve found them hard to hit when I want to hit them and easy to hit when I don’t want to.
And here it is running ZeroRanger in tate mode. This didn’t work as well as I wanted it to - I’d been hoping to reassign the d-pad to have the shot controls on it, but it turns out the analogue stick is linked to the pad in the assignment - not sure if that’s the game’s fault or the device’s. Anyway, I was able to rotate the controls so the stick works as it should in tate but I have to have my left hand at the bottom of the device on the stick and my right at the top on the buttons. Which is probably more stable than trying to hold the whole thing at one edge. It’s a bit heavier than a wonderswan.
So anyway, this thing seems pretty neat so far. I really don’t have a good grip on PC specs but I think it’s less powerful than the Steamdeck and many of the other handheld PCs out there - it’s about a year old, for one. And I think the retail price is higher than the deck, too. I got this one second hand for what I thought was a good price, and I’m happy with it so far. Now I have to figure out how to tell whether it meets spec for more demanding games before I buy them, I guess.
Although it seems pretty good, there are some things to watch with this model. Apparently some of them shipped with viruses - the speculation online is someone in QA was infecting them during testing. I wiped mine’s hard drive and started fresh, so hopefully even if there were viruses they’re gone now. There’s also a production issue where some were made with the wrong wi-fi chip, including mine. Again, I don’t understand PC specs, but apparently my wifi is not going to be as good as advertised. Oh well. I thought at first that the battery was rubbish - it barely seemed to last at all. Now that I’m playing games on it instead of installing the operating system and copying over big files, it seems to last much longer and I’m not getting as much heat out the vents.
Aside from playing games on it, one thing I was wanting this for was accessing my MiSTer’s file system through the network without having to run back and forwards from my TV to my desktop. I’ve been putting stuff on the MiSTer using wget in its Linux command line, so it’s good to be able to use a browser from the couch to get things off GitHub or wherever instead of typing in their very long web addresses.
This is a GPD Win 3, the i7 model. To be honest, I barely know what an i7 is - I stopped paying attention to computer specs in the late 90s and I have been happy that way for many years. Essentially what this thing is is a PC that’s shaped like a Switch - it’s about the same height and width, though twice as thick. Plus, it has this:
Yep, Windows 11. Oh, also a keyboard. The keyboard is a bit naff, to be honest. Sometimes I use the on-screen touch keyboard instead, to save on working the sliding mechanism too much. Anyway, the main controls are the game pad bits on either side - it’s got two sticks, a d-pad, start and select, four face buttons, and two shoulders on each side. Plus a fingerprint sensor for unlocking it and a tiny button dedicated to bringing up the windows Xbox interface which I’ll probably try to remap. On the left side of the console is a switch to go between controller and mouse mode - in mouse mode the right stick moves the mouse, the shoulder buttons do the clicks (sadly, not the way I’d choose - L1 is left click, L2 middle button, R1 is right click, and R2 increases movement speed. I’d rather have left and right click on R1 and R2 respectively which would make it easier to use with one hand and free up my left for the keyboard). The d-pad and face buttons get allocated to the scroll wheel, HOME and END, and the arrow keys. It basically works but it’s not spectacular, and I’ll probably look to set up a controller-based launcher for when I’m just using it to play games. Though I may also use this thing for other PC stuff. I’m pretty sure it’s a lot more powerful than my decade old desktop.
Here’s the dock - the base unit has one USB-A socket at the top and a USB-C socket (or thunderbolt? I haven’t kept up with sockets, either) at the bottom, through which the dock can connect power, HDMI, and more USBs. This was useful for example when I needed to connect a USB stick with a large casing that would have stopped me from sliding up to get to the keyboard. Also good for hooking up to the TV. The built in screen is 720p, less than some of the competing models, but high enough that I’ve turned up the text size in windows to be able to see things clearly.
Also visible here are the air inlet/outlets - air goes in through the vents in the back and goes out through the ones at the top. I often rest this thing on my leg when I’m using it and block the intake, hopefully that won’t cause too many problems. There are also a couple of extra customisable buttons on the back, the slightly lighter coloured bumpy bits near the edges. By default one of these is ESC and the other is CTRL-ALT-DEL. I’ve found them hard to hit when I want to hit them and easy to hit when I don’t want to.
And here it is running ZeroRanger in tate mode. This didn’t work as well as I wanted it to - I’d been hoping to reassign the d-pad to have the shot controls on it, but it turns out the analogue stick is linked to the pad in the assignment - not sure if that’s the game’s fault or the device’s. Anyway, I was able to rotate the controls so the stick works as it should in tate but I have to have my left hand at the bottom of the device on the stick and my right at the top on the buttons. Which is probably more stable than trying to hold the whole thing at one edge. It’s a bit heavier than a wonderswan.
So anyway, this thing seems pretty neat so far. I really don’t have a good grip on PC specs but I think it’s less powerful than the Steamdeck and many of the other handheld PCs out there - it’s about a year old, for one. And I think the retail price is higher than the deck, too. I got this one second hand for what I thought was a good price, and I’m happy with it so far. Now I have to figure out how to tell whether it meets spec for more demanding games before I buy them, I guess.
Although it seems pretty good, there are some things to watch with this model. Apparently some of them shipped with viruses - the speculation online is someone in QA was infecting them during testing. I wiped mine’s hard drive and started fresh, so hopefully even if there were viruses they’re gone now. There’s also a production issue where some were made with the wrong wi-fi chip, including mine. Again, I don’t understand PC specs, but apparently my wifi is not going to be as good as advertised. Oh well. I thought at first that the battery was rubbish - it barely seemed to last at all. Now that I’m playing games on it instead of installing the operating system and copying over big files, it seems to last much longer and I’m not getting as much heat out the vents.
Aside from playing games on it, one thing I was wanting this for was accessing my MiSTer’s file system through the network without having to run back and forwards from my TV to my desktop. I’ve been putting stuff on the MiSTer using wget in its Linux command line, so it’s good to be able to use a browser from the couch to get things off GitHub or wherever instead of typing in their very long web addresses.
