Vital stats Valve Steam Deck

Valve Steam Deck from £349 / steamdeck.com

Time to Switch your allegiance?

Valve’s beefy PC handheld looks suspiciously like your Switch, but should Nintendo be worried about its OLED party being crashed?

● Quite the power

The Steam Deck might be ‘only’ a portable machine, but it’s designed to run the graphics-intense AAA games you normally play on your PC without breaking a sweat. To achieve this, Valve partnered with AMD to create a custom chip that employs a Zen 2 CPU and RDNA 2 GPU, alongside 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM and up to 512GB of NVME SSD storage. We’re not looking at a console anywhere near as powerful as the PS5 or XSX, but the Switch can consider itself crushed in terms of raw specs.

● Ding dong, the Switch is dead

Comparisons to the Switch are inevitable – and valid, because ultimately that will be the Steam Deck’s most obvious competition. At 7in, the touchscreen display is the same size as that of the Switch OLED, although Valve’s LCD has a slightly higher resolution at 1280x800, with a 16:10 aspect ratio and 60Hz refresh rate. Like the new Switch, it can be docked for playing games on a bigger screen… and also like the new Switch, it won’t output in 4K.

● Trigger it out

This is a bit of a kitchen-sink effort when it comes to how you play games on it. You’ve got full-size controls with twin triggers on each side at the back, as well as four user-assignable buttons. A pair of trackpads with haptic feedback are designed to make games originally intended for a PC interface more comfortably playable in the handheld format, and there are even touch sensors built into the thumbsticks for extra precision – plus you can fine-tune your aim using the gyro sensor. Add all of that up, and Mario might just have a bigger foe than Bowser to worry about.

TRACKPADS WITH HAPTIC FEEDBACK

ARE DESIGNED TO MAKE PC GAMES MORE PLAYABLE

In recent years the soundbar has come out on top in the battle for TV audio supremacy, with full surround-sound systems preferred only by those who have enough room to swing two or three cats… but Sony’s HT-A9 gives this story a modern twist: phantom speakers. Made up of four mains-powered satellite units plus a small control hub (you can add a sub if you like), the HT-A9 system uses the speakers’ in-built mics to work out where each one is positioned in the room, with 360 Spatial Sound Mapping meaning they can use their upfiring drivers to trick your ears into thinking the sound’s actually coming from 12 of them. The setup supports Dolby Atmos and DTS:X, plus Chromecast and Airplay 2. £1599 / sony.co.uk