For me, the Steam Deck was just too large, and the screen was truly terrible. It made games that I'm familiar with look visibly wrong with how poor the color gamut coverage was. I ended up selling it. The Steam Deck was also a bad experience for launchers outside of Steam, and I didn't want to get banned from Overwatch or Fortnite for trying to play them on an unsupported operating system, if they were even compatible.

I currently have a Nintendo Switch OLED which is fantastic in many ways, and I also have an AYANEO Air, which has a beautiful OLED screen too. The Air is also an equally good (or arguably even fuller, given Windows 11 + WSL) "desktop" experience compared to the Steam Deck, which so many people around here are touting as a feature. It also uses hall effect triggers and joysticks, so drift should never be a problem, ever. The Air is also the size of a Switch Lite, so even smaller than my Switch OLED, but the Air has a full x86-64 processor and 16GB of RAM running Windows smoothly, which is just crazy to behold.

Whenever I can use the Switch OLED for a game, that is the best available portable experience: whisper quiet, long battery life, never gets hot, the kickstand is incredibly good, and I can always take the controllers off when I want to put the Switch on a table. The only exception is a few titles that had truly terrible ports, but those aren't common in my experience at all. HD Rumble is also a really good implementation of controller rumble. With the Switch, it is also possible to buy physical versions of many games, and sell those when you're done, which really isn't possible on the Steam Deck or the AYANEO Air.

The AYANEO Air is great for using Steam In-Home Streaming or playing some of the titles that I can't play on the Switch (like Horizon Zero Dawn or the various Halo titles), but the battery life isn't as good, the controllers aren't detachable, there's no kickstand, and (like the Steam Deck) it is a much hotter and louder device.

Either the Switch or the AYANEO are small enough to throw in a carry-on bag (important because I don't think I've checked luggage a single time in the past decade), whereas the Steam Deck is like trying to bring a second, chunkier laptop (4x the thickness of my M2 MacBook Air, for reference), which just does not work with the size restrictions on a carry-on bag when you're also bringing a real laptop, clothes, chargers, and everything else needed to travel.

My wish list for Steam Deck 2.0 is basically: it would be physically smaller (but shrinking the bezels would allow the screen to not shrink as much as the device), the screen would be OLED like my other handhelds (and implicitly more color accurate), perfect driver support for Windows 11, hall effect controls, and the screen would support Variable Refresh Rate, which seems like a killer feature that no handheld has bothered to implement.

It's also completely baffling to me that the AYANEO Air has a full 2280 NVMe SSD in a chassis the size of a Nintendo Switch Lite, but the Steam Deck only manages to fit a 2230 in a chassis that's probably twice the physical volume. Given how much more I use my Switch than my Air, I've considered selling the Air, but it does still offer some unique capabilities.