GADGET GURU

Finding speed cameras, cutting onions without crying, making lenses work with any camera… what can’t he do?

There’s no good answer here. So here’s Guru’s slightly out there suggestion: a cheap tablet like the Amazon Fire HD 10

AYou would likely expect Guru to suggest a hoofing great gaming laptop here, right? Wrong as usual, reader: that’s a dumb and incredibly expensive idea. A gaming laptop can be a great thing if you’re lugging it from place to place, and there are indeed some absolutely superb examples out there, but they’re best used on a desk. That fits one definition of portable, but not all of them.

Perhaps you’ve seen Alienware’s Concept UFO prototype, waved around at CES to great excitement. Ignore comparisons to the Nintendo Switch (they’re about as relevant as comparing its horizontal layout to that of the Atari Lynx, really) and look at the meat of it, and it seems like a pretty decent little thing, a promising idea for the future of portable PC games. You can’t have one, though. You can’t even have the neat little GPD Win 2, which does actually exist, because stock seems to have run out

ABOVE

To be fair, in the LAN party days, this wasn’t that weird a sight…

– expect an announcement and a Kickstarter for the Win 3 and/or Win MAX some time very soon.

Basically there’s no good answer here. So here’s Guru’s slightly out there suggestion: a cheap tablet like the Amazon Fire HD 10 (from $279). Admittedly you’re not going to be playing PC games on the bus, but if you’re in network range of your existing gaming PC, you can hook up a Bluetooth controller, sideload the Steam Link app, and get playing in seconds. Maybe even grab a controller adapter for around $15 and clamp it to your Android handset? Presto: you’re playing on the toilet.