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Handheld consoles can be a lot of fun, especially in recent years, when you can literally pick up a handheld gaming PC and not be locked into an ecosystem or a specific platform. However, for the portability you get, there are sacrifices you need to make, and sometimes, they just might not be worth it.
Why I Want a Handheld Console
Before Valve put PC gaming into people’s palms with the Steam Deck, a handheld console was one of the easiest entry points into unchartered territory, especially if you’re a PC gamer. For me, the biggest reason to get a handheld console was the ability to play games in other ecosystems, especially Nintendo.
However, since the launch of the Steam Deck, a ton of PC gaming handhelds have flooded the market, greatly expanding what a handheld console can do. Not being big on phone gaming, a handheld console is the perfect intersection for my gaming and lifestyle habits.
Then there’s the portability aspect. Having a dedicated console that you may pull out on the subway means that you don’t spend your time hunkered down on your phone, gaming on which can be a complete nightmare sometimes. Handheld consoles let you play anytime, anywhere. And withnew gaming handhelds hitting the market, now’s a good time to consider buying one.
So Why Haven’t I Bought One Yet?
As mentioned before, while handheld consoles let you enjoy your games away from your desk or TV screen, they come with some compromises. At the moment, the following five reasons are keeping me from buying one.
1. The Price
The pricing for handheld consoles is a little confusing at the moment. It’s fine if you want to buy a console to play older games or even the Nintendo Switch, in which case you’ll be spending an understandable $200 to $350 respectively. However, if you want to get a PC gaming handheld (something I was interested in), things are different.
One of the cheapest PC handhelds you can pick up right now is the base model Steam Deck coming in around $400 on Amazon at the time of writing. It’s not the most powerful handheld out there, and if you’re looking for better performance, screen, or battery life, you can spend as much as $800 on an ROG Ally X or even higher for something like the OneXFly.
At that price, you can easily get a mid-tier gaming laptop that’ll provide far more power and practicality than a handheld. Not to mention you won’t have to worry about buying a keyboard, mouse, monitor, and dock to put it all together in case you’re looking to use your handheld as your PC.
It doesn’t make much sense as someone who already owns a gaming laptop. My MSI GL65 Leopard is quite dated at this point with an i5-9300H, 16GB RAM, and GTX1650 Ti, but it’s still more than capable of running games. For the price of a good gaming handheld, a new laptop with an 11th or 12th gen i5 or i7 and RTX 30-series GPU will easily be a more value-for-money proposition.
2. Non-Gaming Performance and Use Cases
Even if you can look past pricing, handheld consoles aren’t really multipurpose devices. They’re built to play games, but you can’t do much more than that.
For example, if you own something like a Nintendo Switch, you can’t do much other than play games, maybe browse the internet, andaccess a few streaming services. For handled PCs like the Steam Deck, ROG Ally, or MSI Claw, sure, you get a fully functioning computer, but it’s nowhere close to the performance and experience a similarly priced laptop can provide.
When it comes to non-gaming applications, traditional handhelds like the Switch won’t do you much good. A handheld PC can be docked, and several of them run Windows out of the box, so that does go a long way in providing extra utility.
That said, you’ll also need to spend extra to get a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and in some cases, the dock itself. When the costs add up, a mid-tier gaming laptop starts to feel like a much better value-for-money proposition. Not to mention Windows still isn’t optimized for the seven or so inch touch screens that these devices come with.
Do keep in mind that this can change with the upcoming crop of ARM processors in the form of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X series or even theIntel Lunar Lake chips, but it’s going to be a while before we see these newer chips in gaming PC handhelds. So for now, I’d hold off on that purchase.
3. Game Availability and Compatibility
Once again, there are two aspects to game availability and compatibility here. If you’re going for a more traditional gaming handheld like the Switch or even the Analogue Pocket, you’re pretty much locked into the game library supported by the console. Depending on the games you play, this may or may not be an issue.
If you switch to a PC gaming handheld, this issue is resolved to some extent because you get access to every PC game. However, that’s where compatibility and performance issues start popping up. Gaming handhelds have much bigger performance limitations than even mid-tier gaming laptops, and the form factor means the OS, whether Windows or SteamOS, also needs to be properly optimized.
This means that while technically, you can run your entire PC gaming library on a handheld PC, you will run into compatibility and performance issues. If you only play a few specific games and the handheld you have in mind can handle those, you can still justify the purchase, but you won’t be churning out AAA titles on handhelds, not with high framerates anyway.
4. Form Factor and Battery Life
I tend to play a lot of sim racing and FPS games. A gaming handheld is practically useless for both. Sure, I can have fun playing Forza Horizon 5 from the couch or on the subway, but the second I want to move to something more serious like Assetto Corsa or iRacing, I will have to move to my desk.
The same applies to FPS titles like CS2, Valorant, and Rainbow 6 Siege. Years of muscle memory from using a mouse to play games mean I can’t play most of my games using the joysticks a handheld provides. And if I need to plug a mouse in; we’re back to square one.
Don’t get me wrong here, gaming handhelds can actually be surprisingly ergonomic to hold, but they’re just not made for every type of game. As a general rule of thumb, any games you can play on your PC with a controller, you can play just fine on a handheld. However, if you try to play a game you’d rather use a mouse and keyboard, things change.
Console gamers have an advantage here, considering they’re used to playing most games on a controller, so switching to a handheld won’t feel as alien. However, PC gamers get the short end of the stick here.
The compact form factor of handheld consoles also means there’s less battery life for gaming away from a wall outlet. The whole point of a handheld is to be able to enjoy games away from the restrictions of a wall outlet or a desk, but handheld battery life figures leave much to be desired at the moment.
If you play a heavy AAA title at decent FPS, you’ll struggle to get past four to five hours on most PC handhelds. You can switch to a lower power mode that reduces the CPU/GPU TDP, but that can significantly affect performance. Nintendo claims a battery life of anywhere between four and nine hours on the Switch, so that’s your best case for battery life. That said, it comes at the expense of depending onNintendo’s game library.
5. The Competition
Last but not least, there’s a lot of competition in the gaming handheld space. And that’s a good thing as it keeps manufacturers in check, so we don’t see outrageous pricing as they constantly add new features. However, when talking about gaming, remember that your PC, console, and even phone compete in the same space. You can evenplay Nintendo Switch games on your Macif you’d like.
For starters, modern handheld consoles that run older games on emulators are often Android-based, meaning with a little research and tweaking, you can get your phone to run a fair bunch of these older games. The gaming laptop market is also heating up, meaning you can pick up quite a capable laptop for the price of a good handheld.
There are a lot of choices, and if you want the most performance and practicality for your money, handhelds don’t make sense at the moment. Unless of course, you’re looking for a specific platform like Nintendo’s, in which case a handheld would be the ideal way to go.
In the end, handheld gaming consoles offer a tempting escape into the world of gaming on the go. However, for PC gamers like myself, the limitations in power, form factor, and even software optimization make the high price tag a tough pill to swallow. While the future of handheld PCs looks bright, my trusty (if slightly dated) laptop will keep me company on the couch—and everywhere else.
