This will probably be the biggest competition the Steam Deck has within the handheld PC space.
Most noteworthy is that windows is finally focusing on providing a decent handheld experience, including booting straight to a controller friendly interface, and reducing background processes for better fps and battery.
Edit: The handheld Xbox UI will.come to all windows PCs, but it’s not clear if the reduced performance bloat version will be available. It sounds like only Xbox branded devices may get the full benefit of optimized windows.
It’s also the ugliest handheld PC yet (imo), but I can appreciate that they’re pushing for comfort over looks.
Conversely I bought a Steam Deck specifically because of the trackpads but I find I only ever use them on the rare occasion that I need to go to desktop mode. I love my Deck but I’ve discovered that could easily live without the trackpads if they weren’t there.
I can’t and won’t play any first person perspective game with a regular controller. Track pad + gyro is so much fun! It love to at least see capacitive touch sticks + gyro adopted by other manufacturers.
I end up using the stick for movement, the pad for aiming.
And, due to a hand/wrist injury… switched the aiming to the left pad, and movement to the right stick, and then the right trigger is still fire, and the right track pad is a 4 way gated set of ‘buttons’.
In desktop, ive got the left pad moving the mouse, up click on the right pad is left click, down click on the right pad is right click… and then any kind of click on the left pad is screen zoom.
Yep, its weird, but I love it lol.
The only thing they could improve, at this point, imo… is a way to adjust the left right up down sizes of the zones for the edge scrolling to work on a pad.
It works perfectly when you point your finger at it at a perpendicular angle, but with a thumb, the surface area of the thumb makes contact over a different shape, so thats why theres so many reports of edge scrolling ‘not working’ for people with certain sized/shaped thumbs and grips.
I tried so hard to make that combo work for me, but ended up back with the sticks. Maybe I need to try something other than Half-Life 2.