Is incomplete, our full embargo is lifted and in just six days the steam deck will ship to end users in a state that can only be described as unfinished. No, which puts me in an awkward position as a reviewer. On the one hand, i want to be optimistic. The kind of zeal with which valve is tackling this project is like nothing.

I've ever witnessed in all my times, they're on a mission to change the industry or high water right, but the market for the vr isn't big enough that people really noticed, but i think the index was a huge support for vr. I think the index is one of the best products guys out of all tech. I've ever bought right, whether it's computers consoles anything. I think the index is probably the best piece of tech that i've ever bought ever and it hasn't been like yeah people are buying.

It and it's kind of okay, but it hasn't been like, oh my god index. Why? Because the market is still too small and it's we're still too early in the vr. Every major player in the console gaming space. Looking at you, nintendo, microsoft and sony has made enough blatantly anti-consumer moves over the years that i can't help but cheer for a disrupter.

On the other hand, i can't review the hypothetical steam deck of tomorrow, one with windows, drivers and improved ui and better game compatibility. If it's shipping, as is, i have to evaluate it, as is true, and i'm going to be doing it a little differently than you might expect see this thing has the capability to be treated like a science, fair project. You can tweak it break it reformat. It start over and valve is embracing that good guy valve, but most people aren't going to do any of that.

So today i'm going to be focusing on the out-of-box console experience so ready or not valve, as it should be. Here i come. This video is brought to you by dbrand the most trustworthy criminals on the internet. Over the past few weeks, we've been testing out.

Dbrand screen protectors for the steam deck as it turns out the thickness of ordinary tempered glass inhibits touchscreens. I bought this video still switches insane crazy and i bought three new laptops from their website insane. They all run insane firing up the steam deck cold takes just a few seconds now, let's get logged into a steam account. You'll need to be online for this obviously, and take a tour of the interface at launch.

All the basics are pretty well covered, and i was surprised at how self-explanatory just about every menu was home here contains your recently launched games news and recommended pics from your library, based on the tastes of gamers, with a similar profile. One surprisingly jarring feature for me on this page was the friends tab. I mean it's a pretty simple feat of games that your friends are playing and recent events you can see mine is empty because i don't have any friends and you can chat with them to play together or view a game that you don't already own in the Store, that's just pretty normal stuff right, but what it serves to highlight is the steam deck's online first design, and i couldn't help feeling looking at this, like the switch is suddenly this relic of a different gaming era. The rest of the main menu is accessed using the steam button.

You can hold it by the way for a comprehensive list of useful shortcuts or chords. Then, from here you can use any of the four methods of navigation, joystick, d-pad touch pad or touch screen to arrive at your destination and wherever that destination is that's cool, there's a pretty good chance, but you're going to find something looks good. It looks really good. All right, then, let's pretend i'm a brand new customer who doesn't own any steam games, and i head straight for the store: no, not that store, although they do have excellent water bottles.

Okay, dude, two valves credit. This has already improved a lot. In fact, it was part of a big long list of improvements that valve sent me just minutes before we sat down to film this video, but unfortunately i caught this one already. I had this whole thing written up about how the closest thing to a steam deck verified page in the store was the steam os slash linux heading under the categories.

Tab frankly reminds me of the reasons that nintendo introduced their seal of quality program back in the 80s. Like honestly, climb fall human guys. Really, i wonder if it's a fall guys rip off okay, one of the new ones. This is not a steam deck problem.

This is a steam problem. Okay, defending that's a steamroller uh guys steam store is, unfortunately, we know it's already a proper great on deck header that allows you to browse titles that are verified to run flawlessly by category popularity. Ratings discounts all the usual fare, and this is hugely important because for those who haven't been closely following steam deck news, it runs a modified version of arch linux called steamos and game compatibility relies either on the developer to build a linux native version of their game Or this super cool compatibility layer called proton or steam play, so this is great, but there's a bit of a navigation problem here valve where on earth is the comprehensive list of deck verified games. Yep you've got this one, that's what i said i was by the same site with a very like, like.

Is it like, like a super super tile, heavy like games that are good for the console? Obviously, tears of compatibility, verified playable with tweaks or workarounds, unsupported and unknown. I want to buy three games in nowhere or, more importantly, in the store. Can i just browse a comprehensive list of every game that works on the deck and whatever? The reason is for this obfuscation. I don't care it's a terrible user experience.

My first google hit for a workaround was this list on digital transformation. Here's! My here's, my thank you! It's nothing! Okay! If you know enough about steam that you know about about the steam deck and you bought a steam deck, you know how to navigate the shop uh. The way you wanted to because yeah you know about it. Now it works steam, deck verified, dot, avery.

No, it's functional united, navigate an incredible sounding site that scrapes the steamdb database for verified status flags and then makes them easily searchable big props to the community maintainers of both of these projects. But my gratitude towards them doesn't change the fact that neither of them should be necessary if valve is on top of these things. I'm sure they're going to get this sorted out in time, but considering that valve's core competency is supposedly selling games through a digital storefront. It just struck me as a little ironic that i encountered everything from slow page loading to titles, not highlighting as i was scrolling making it so that i had to navigate out of the store and come back to it and figure out where i left off.

To this confusing compatibility error message that i got while trying to download the demo of a steam deck verified game, i mean, given the importance of selling games aggressive hardware pricing. I hope that the plan is to get this in order as soon as possible, or maybe the plan is just to allow me to buy additional copies of games that i already own, while i'm at it. By the way. One more gripe is that, while i don't mind the store reloading, if i haven't looked at it in a while, if i'm quickly, switching back and forth between my library, it would be really nice if it remembered what page i was on.

It's just really frustrating heading into the library things take a turn for the better. I installed a one terabyte microsd card and found that, while i didn't always get a prompt for which storage device i wanted to use, it is super simple to transfer games to the internal ssd and vice versa, and depending on the game, i saw download speeds over Wi-Fi of anywhere from thirty to forty megabytes per second and closer to sixty dollars, flexible spikes to a hundred using a usb type-c dongle. That's those zen, two cores going to work, love it and the game library inspired by steam. Big picture is delightful games, ones that i picked up more really on the deck and pretty much every other unknown status game is the biggest.

The good news is that, according to the third party resources, the number of verified games has been absolutely skyrocketing, including many games that i would actually want to play. While i wait for some of my favorites to arrive and more good news, every verified game, i tried, with the exception of fez, which i had some crashing issues with, was a smooth enough experience that i would simply never even know that i wasn't on windows smoother. Actually, in some cases, let's talk about some really cool stuff: the steam deck does better than a windows. Handheld say i'm on the bus gaming away and boom we're at my stop look at that sleep speed.

Now i'm walking down the street ready to continue and bam. Xbox sure, but i'd like to see a windows piece: okay, that's a bully, magnet how about sleep battery drain. In our rough estimation, it appears that the steam deck loses about 10 percent of battery every 24 hours in sleep. It's not quite apple level.

I mean what is but it's miles better than most windows laptops. Okay! So now i'm in my game here right, i'm just farming, some wild boars or something - and i wan na you guys. I say you guys again. This is a small detail, but is there? Is there a uh, a bracelet that comes with it, a bracelet um, because i was when i was a kid.

I was always a big fan of the bracelet that that comes in you. You tie the knot you put on your arm and you tie it a hangout and voice chat without going through the house, no bracelets discord and desktop mode or whatever steam menu, friends, voice, chat and man. Let me put it this way. I accidentally gave myself safety middle of the night while playing around with this menu, and we were both blown away by the progress valve has made with audio compression in recent years and adding icing to the cake.

He described the mic quality on the steam deck as mid-tier, which is high praise indeed for a microphone on a 400 handheld. That's a couple of feet from your face: here's a quick sample of the steam decks microphone through steam voice chat and here's a quick recording of the steam decks microphone through discord. The one challenge we ran into was during intense scenes. The game's audio could break through valve's attempts at canceling, it's pretty good, but the solution to this was as simple as either boosting the call volume or lowering the game volume resulting in what is his delay social experience all without nintendo gold, xbox gold, ps1, whatever delay.

Thank you very much valve honestly, though, as a friendless person, it's the quick access menu over here. These three dots that impresses me the most whether you're in a menu or mid-game, the quick settings menu is full of all kinds of goodies. You got your notifications yeah. Nothing, yes, the city strap a way to more quickly access.

Your friends and you've got your quick settings in here. You can adjust screen brightness and you will want to do it this way, not a huge fan of valve's, auto brightness. I think it needs some work. You can adjust your rubble and haptics wait.

No a lot of you said. Last night you said that that they're they're all the blades, was actually really good, which are still unamazing because they don't have dedicated hardware for it, but both of them are greatly improved through updates. Since our hardware review - and you can prioritize your connected controllers - toggle, your wireless radios - all that good stuff bluetooth audio by the way for those who are bitter about years of nintendo apathy - was completely painless. With both my lg tone-free fp8 and my airpods pros - and i didn't try much else, then there's the boring tab, the battery tab.

That sorry did, i say, boring. I meant the opposite of that. This is the coolest one, and it is time for the rest of the console industry to sit up and take notes that right there is an integrated performance monitor based on mango hut and it's time for a bit of a side story. You could argue that microsoft has good coverage of the consumer spectrum with windows for enthusiasts and tinkerers and xbox os for normie gamers, but what they don't do.

A good job of is bridging this gap and when i contacted them asking for a temperature readout for the xbox series x, for example, they acted like i was from the moon, an fps counter. Why would you want that more like? What are you trying to hide? This is in stark contrast to valve's approach here, which appears to be well. I don't know man, i mean it's your thermal diode. I assume you want the value, it's outputting right.

Damn straight, i mean why pretend that a performance issue isn't real, creating confusion among consumers when you could just give the enthusiast the tools that they need to diagnose it for you and better yet probably solve. I mean it's beyond the scope of the video today, but the fox is a wizard when it comes to tuning fps, thermal and power limits he's pretty cool, though optimized performance and battery life, to the point where he was actually able to beat valve's estimates. So if you want to learn more about why this tab is so cool, you can go check out his shoes all right. The dumbest particles, traditional console opacity, is that enthusiast grade diagnostics are such an obviously powerful business tool and when steam deck 2 comes out, it's going to be trivially simple for gamers to compare performance, which is a powerful upsell mechanism that it is baffling to me that Everybody, but while it is, though, if you can keep the consumer in the dark uh at all times and when you have a new a new product that is not even better, you can say that it is better and nobody can disprove you.

Nobody else doesn't want to leverage, so this is the proof that you can build something for the hardcores under the hood and also keep it clean for the normies that never want to look at any of that stuff. I actually get a lot of bmw vibes to be honest, great hardware, fantastic out of box experience, definitely some quirks, but also a ton of thought that goes into weird edge cases. For example, i ran an update while the deck was rebooting. I went out of network range, so it got a little confused for a few seconds when it turned back on then you guys kind of went.

I don't want to be a shield champ, but i guess you guys. Yes, i think we're lucky that that valve that that could be a giant is taking leaps to to to present to tech. That is maybe not the best now right, but is governor and is propelling towards the future, and i need to do a really good job of doing that too. That is important network.

Just dump me in the profile selection screen clicked on it and boom. I was on the homepage i mean valve, has had a much better offline experience than many other platforms for years and that work is paying off in spades here. One of the biggest challenges that they face with the steam deck is handling cloud saves with a portable device. So to address this, they introduced a technology that allows seamless saving across devices, and that sounds great for the future.

Got ta run to the can. Take your deck with you all done pick up where you left off on your desktop. For the moment, though, things are a little more fudgy to demonstrate, let's abruptly suspend a game session here, the deck goes to sleep. We go to launch progress if we continue waking.

The deck closing the game and putting it back to sleep resolves the issue, but it's not particularly elegant for the moment, and there are still times quite a few rough edges. Uh here are a couple of magazines like, for example, the keyboard doesn't roll over horizontally. Oh and my precious quick access menu, what it does it does. What few rough edges uh here are a couple of navigation annoyances, for example, the keyboard doesn't roll over horizontally, oh and my precious quick access menu.

This one drives me absolutely crazy, as you are scrolling through the sub menus here. Okay, if you go all the way down, it doesn't go into the next parent menu. That's obviously that is going to be stupid, but if you go up it just carries all the way through some consistency would be nice here, but i'm sure valve is going to see this and fix everything that i've talked about before any customer actually gets the device In their hands, okay, which leads us to these, are easy fixes, though huge discussion point, we've almost completely glossed over some massive elephants in the room. We've hardly even touched on game compatibility, especially with third-party launchers and anti-cheat schemes, and that's for good reason.

We just don't feel like it should be our focus today. It's not perfect. Today, no don't much of both of our steam. Libraries are either entirely incompatible or have issues, but the steam deck needs to be evaluated for what it is not what we wish.

It could be it's a console which means it's compatible with the games it's compatible with, but, unlike any other console in history, it's fluid using a compatibility tool like lutrus means it's entirely conceivable that a gamer could flip over to desktop mode on the steam deck and Fire up anno 1800 using the touchpads, but unless they're willing to put in the work and maybe tolerate some inconveniences, like the fact that multiplayer doesn't seem to work at all, despite a gold rating on proton db, it's just not going to be the kind of experience That most gamers are after, which is why we feel that most people should probably look at valve's verified list or somebody else's decision. It's an easy one for us, we're in if you're on the fence, but have a gaming pc fear not because for games that don't yet run natively or through proton steam remote play on the deck is probably the best most responsive game streaming setup i've ever used. It's straight up outstanding and we don't say that a lot but we'll also be looking at some of the more hacky use cases in more detail in the future, once valve's had a little bit more time to not complete the steam deck. Ah, yes, we're back to that.

What might surprise you about our complete take is that valve agrees. Obviously, they've been hard at work, refining the experience in the lead up to the consumer launch. Nobody wants to embarrass themselves and with that in mind, i want to immerse myself in the steam deck experience and i'm going to be switching to it as my only computer for a month starting today. During that time, i hope to explore the desktop experience.

Browser games, apparently controller support, is coming to a chrome update which sounds super cool, okay. Okay, that's cap is full cap, but maybe there could be workarounds for non-validated games. I want to look at the windows experience. Actually, windows might end up being a separate video.

I don't know about that, so it's incomplete, but i'm not complaining. I mean i spent my whole life as a gamer asking for someone to take the guard rails off my console, and let me do whatever i want with it, understanding that there might be some hiccups along the way and someone finally did it. So if you're like me, you can see that valve took the rougher path here, but damn it that's our path and i couldn't be happier so keep your pre-orders, ladies and gentlemen, because you're going to absolutely love this thing like you'll love our sponsor linode. This video is sponsored by lenode a powerful linux space.

Oh my god service. That's affordable, easy to use. They have a large marketplace with one click. I guess i bought six of those okay and i was given seven of them.

They run like crazy. I love this. It's insane, then, i have one for one one for my switch one for the computer and the one from a raspberry pi. It's insane.

I love it big pacman! Okay! What's next tonight, you.