 As I sit here right now, the Steam Deck OLED was revealed worldwide yesterday and here's mine. I want to give a big thank you to Valve who hit me up a few days ago and said they were gonna send me something secret and special but couldn't tell me what it is. Oh boy, I wonder what it is. You guys probably have already heard about this by now. I think it's very funny that Valve is following in the footsteps of the Nintendo Switch releasing an OLED model. But I will say that unlike the Switch OLED, which really only just improved the screen itself, making the screen a OLED screen, this new Steam Deck has revamped, refreshed, changed, improved every single little element about the Steam Deck. You don't believe me? I'm gonna prove it to you. We got a box in a box. Ooh, okay. Got a little note in here. Hello, this is your one terabyte Steam Deck OLED review unit. Steam Deck OLED top features. Yeah, this is what I'm excited about. So HDR OLED. This is HDR. Portable HDR. Look, we'll talk about all of that as we keep going. I'm too excited to not just open this thing right now. Your games and our whole new light. That's really cute. It doesn't feel like too long ago that I got the original Steam Deck. Time really flies, but it has been a couple years. I like that this new OLED, they've changed the logo to put a little red dot in the middle. And the reason for that will become clear when we open this. How do I open this? Oh, man, this case is a lot nicer than the last one. Oh, there she is. Now I have my other Steam Deck here to compare. To the untrained eye initially, it's going to look almost exactly the same. There's the red button. So the power button is red. That is not the only change. It's supposed to be a little lighter, which is cool considering how much they've improved. Man, this is such a nice unit. This one has my satisfy stealth grip on. Let's take that off for a second. I swear this feels so light. I think I'm imagining it, but it does feel lighter for sure. Everything else at face value should feel very similar. A couple of key differences just visually, they've darkened the color of the font on the buttons. So it's a bit more grayscale whereas before they were quite white. I'm not sure why they felt the need to change that, but it looks nice either way. Okay, I'm excited just to turn this on and see the screen. That already looks like the Switch OLED screen. Just the way it shines and how bright that white is popping and glowing off the screen. Okay, while that loads up, I'm going to talk about all of the things they improved. And when I said they improved every single little element of the Steam Deck, that even goes down to the power cord that comes with the Steam Deck. This is such a little thing, but I think it reflects on the entire experience of everything being refreshed. They've doubled the length of the charge cord. Look how long this guy is now. I mean that's great for if you want to play in bed because sometimes I feel like I'm getting yanked to the side. Okay, English, not Pacific. What am I now, Eastern? Ooh, the track pads feel so nice. You know what I love so much about setting up a Steam Deck that you don't get with any of these other Windows handhelds? You just log in a Wi-Fi, sign into your Steam account, and you're ready to go. All these other handhelds make you set up Windows 11 before you can get going and ask you all of the Windows questions. Like, do you want to install Windows Office Suite? Yes, that's what I want for gaming on the go. It's Excel spreadsheets. Wow, that is a clean, bright, clear screen. It is popping. It's so bright. It's overexposing on that camera right now. I'm not sure what to load up first, but maybe Spider-Man? Spider-Man's a good test. 65 gigs. Let's see how long it takes to download that. But we're already gaming, and that's, again, what I love so much about it. There's even less fluff than setting up a new Nintendo Switch. It's just out of the box. You're ready to start downloading games in no time. The downloading games part might take a minute, but as I was going to say, they've improved so many things, including the Wi-Fi, which has two to three times faster downloads now with new six gigahertz connectivity. So I tried a little bit of a scuff test to see which Steam Deck would download God of War quicker. I ran them both at the same time, and I think they were throttling each other's downloads, because it was going much slower than with Spider-Man, and it took 21 minutes for both of them to download about 5 gigs of the game. So I decided to pause the old Steam Deck, and sure enough, the new one started rocketing and managed to download the game in about 8 minutes. And then I let the old Steam Deck finish its download, and that only took about 10 minutes, almost 11 minutes. So the new one's definitely faster, and for bigger games, this time might add up. Here's just a couple minutes, but it is cool to see it running quicker. The biggest thing other to me, other than the screen, this new OLED screen, is the battery. So now there's a 50 watt hour battery, which is up from 40 watt in the previous Steam Deck. Now, that's only 10 watts difference, you might be saying, but they're saying that you'll get around 50% extra battery life from the new Steam Deck over the last one. I mean, I'll have to test that out, but that tells me if I'm getting a couple hours playing Witcher 3 in bed, I should get 3 hours, which that makes a big difference. Not only is the screen OLED now, it's actually a little bigger too. Just a little bit. 7.4 inches rather than 7, which means, yes, they did pull a Switch OLED and removed some of the bezel. They didn't go all the way, like Nintendo Switch really brought that screen out. This is just a little bigger and there's still some bezel. It would have been really cool just to get rid of that bezel altogether. I think that really would have put this over the top for just being a perfect refresh. But hey, I ain't complaining about a little bigger. It's 2 AM. I've been playing with this thing all day. I love it and I have a lot more to say, so I'm gonna pop in here or there. Starting with, I did a bunch of tests with Spider-Man and God of War. I compared the OLED Steam Deck to the previous model and my results were pretty staggering to start with Spider-Man. Marvel Spider-Man Remastered makes full use of HDR. Refresh rates default to 90. HDR on, baby. It looks so good though. Okay, this looks amazing. Pun not intended. We're gonna go to Settings, scroll down to HDR, and then you're literally gonna see in real time how much heavy lifting that HDR is doing to making this game look so much more just even realistic just in the colors. That is insane. The side-by-side comparison shots of cutscenes, that lighting is popping so much more the way it blooms out from the window. The colors look so much more natural. And then don't get me started on the sky or the city or any part of this game with the HDR turned on compared to just the flat LCD, no HDR. I mean, you got HDR and OLED. I mean, this is a combination of HDR and the OLED screen. So it's a double whammy with Spider-Man, and it's gorgeous. Next, we have God of War. And while God of War, I don't think has HDR. I couldn't find an option to turn it on. So this is a good comparison of just OLED versus LCD. The visual quality alone isn't what shocked me here because side-by-side, yeah, it's clearer, crisper. We have darker blacks and better colors. Now this I did not expect at all, but the opening cutscene of God of War has a lot of lag, a lot of frame skips. But this new OLED Steam Deck, no frame skips at all. This happened four separate times in the space of 30 seconds on the old model and not at all with the new one. That baffled me initially because I didn't think there should be a reason why games would run better on the new OLED. Well, that's because now there's a more efficient Dishrink 6NM AMD Sephiroth APU. I don't know what any of that means. And there's also a bigger fan in here, a quieter bigger fan and a better heat sink. And with a bit more RAM in it too, that means that the games run even smoother than before. So it smoothed out my experience of God of War and made it seamless. On top of that, I didn't realize that Digital Foundry already did a Spider-Man comparison and looking at their frame rate tests, yeah, we're getting more frame rates and better stable frame rates out of Spider-Man. I did not expect to have better picture quality, HDR, OLED and better performance on the new Steam Deck. Higher fidelity haptics, redesigned trackpad for improved fidelity and edge detection. The touchscreen is better with a higher polling rate of 180 Hertz. Also, I think I said this, it's a 90 Hertz screen now, not 60 Hertz, which also means we can get games up to 90 FPS now on the new Steam Deck, not 60 like the old one. This is already 10 gig downloaded. We're already one fifth downloaded a 50 gigabyte game. That is crazy impressive. We might actually be done before I'm done reading this list of things that make this one better. That's crazy. Faster charge rate. Oh, it would charge from 20 to 80% in as little as 45 minutes. That's nuts, my guy. And if anyone cares about repairs or removing the screen or getting into the console, apparently they've made all of that easier too. With the old Steam Deck, you used to have to take off the back and everything to get to the screen. Apparently you don't have to do that anymore. Well, and you guys might be wondering, well, would that's pretty much everything other than the speakers? I guess that's because the speakers were pretty good before and there was no reason to change them. Nah, they just fixed them anyway. Louder speakers with improved bass. I'm not kidding, everything from the power cord it comes with to the speakers to the screen to the fan and the cooling on the inside to the download rates and the Bluetooth. If there's an element of the Steam Deck fixed before, they decided to improve it and make it better. It's supposed to be like the same size, right? So my stealth grip should theoretically... Oh, that's awesome. It does. It just fits right on. Oh, it's done. I did not honestly think that I would get to launch a game before I stopped filming the unboxing. I'm giddy, I'm actually really excited about this because I gotta say, we're in a really good place with handhelds and we've seen so many cool handhelds pop up lately. Like the Rock Ally. I still haven't had a chance to review the Lenovo but it's right here, here it is. That video is coming soon, I promise. Nothing will ever replace my Nintendo Switch because it feels more like home for me and I get those great first-party, second-party games coming to the Switch. But to have a supplement to that, to have another sleek, comfortable, powerful gaming handheld console that I can play my Steam games on in bed or just play these bigger experiences portably without having to wait for a company to come along and port them to my favorite console, I don't have to rebuy them because I've been in my Steam Deck library for the last 15 years. This is the perfect counterpart to handheld gaming if you already have a Switch and to some people, this might be all you need.