The Steam Deck made taking PC games on the go much easier, and it also spawned an entire market of competitors such as the ASUS ROG Ally. Even in the face of so many alternatives, the original Steam Deck remains popular, especially at its (relatively) low price. Now, the Steam Deck is getting a refresh with an OLED screen and a bunch of other improvements.
Valve has announced the new Steam Deck OLED as a refresh to the original Steam Deck, and there's a lot to look at here. But let's start with the main improvement—the screen. The Steam Deck OLED has an OLED screen, as the name might indicate, which means much darker blacks and overall better colors. The resolution is the same, but the size is slightly bigger at 7.4 inches rather than 7 inches. In addition to this, the screen now has a 90Hz refresh rate. All of this means that your games should look more vivid and flow better thanks to the 90Hz refresh rate.
But despite this being a relatively unassuming upgrade (and by all means not a Steam Deck 2), there's still some internal hardware improvements to get excited about. For example, we have a bigger battery and a more efficient version (7nm to 6nm) of the custom Zen 2 chip the original Steam Deck had, so in theory, while it should perform the same, battery life should be much better. There is also faster RAM, up to 1TB of storage, and support for Wi-Fi 6E. So really, this is just building on top of the original Steam Deck's weaknesses and making the device as good as possible. We don't know when Valve is actually going to release a second-gen Steam Deck, but in the meantime, this is a great upgrade with some much-needed efficiency and a significant screen upgrade.
The new Steam Deck OLED starts at $549.99 and will be released on November 16th, but in the meantime, you can put it on your Steam wishlist so you'll be one of the first to buy it when it comes out.