Hi all! I’ve seen a few posts going either way on this, but I wanted to ask myself because of the new OLED plus a recent sale on the Ally that has come up! In Canada, the SD 512 GB is $690, while the Ally is currently on sale for $700.
I generally play AAA games, and battery life is a factor but not determinative (as I’m usually playing just around the house). Conversely, while most ofy library is on Steam, I do play some games that are on other platforms and/or use their own launchers, and my understanding is it is a bit awkward to get games with their own launchers running on the SD. Open to any suggestions and thoughts! Thanks!
Have you looked at the Legion Go? If you like AAA games and particularly FPS games the vertical mouse and 1600p screen and detachable controllers are super good.
TL;DR IMO buy the OLED.
Generally speaking all of the windows handhelds have MANY reliability issues, for some they work just fine and for many they barely work at all or have recurring issues that bog down the experience. Or you might even get really unlucky with defective models (a common issue with the ROG Ally).
So if you want something as refined as PC handhelds get, the steam deck is your best option. But if you want an alternative the Legion GO is currently the best of these deck competitors; it’s the only competition to have a better screen than the OLED deck in terms of colour accuracy anyway. It also has the same battery capacity, tho it will have much worse battery life than the steam deck (especially the OLED).
For me I would go with the OLED because of the many quality of life features that it has that simply don’t exist on alternatives yet, not to mention steam is being designed best for the steam deck. The OLED is also really inexpensive on the 512GB model, not to mention third party SSD’s can go up to 2tb, or for 1tb they can be cheaper than buying a 1tb model. I am a long term deck user so I am very biased, and I’m especially biased since I’ve never used any other PC handhelds. So take my words with a heap of salt.
I’ll always recommend the Steam Deck over any other handheld gaming device because it gets more support from Valve and from other devs. It may not be the most powerful, but it’s more reliable and future proof.