Patience is a virtue, as a PlayStation 5 is still hard to find a little over two years after its launch. Luckily, if you’re looking to buy a Steam deck, you no longer have to chase pre-orders that far away. Valve now ships them as soon as you buy them—no waits, no queues, no $5 reservations. Additionally, official docking stations are now available for sale.
Valve has announced easier ordering and the availability of new docking station accessories. twitter When vaporOn top of that, Valve announced “many” software updates for SteamOS. This will dramatically improve the docking experience. The keyboard has been updated as well as the offline mode. (The latter should help alleviate a common pain point for Steam Deck users, as many Steam games require an online connection for authentication.)
You can see the news in Valve’s announcement video here.
The official Steam Deck Docking Station is $89. There are also some third-party docks out there, some of which are cheaper, but we expect Valve’s Docking Station to set a new standard for connectivity. The price docks come with USB 2.0 ports, but all USB-A ports on Valve’s docks are version 3.1. It also offers Gigabit Ethernet connectivity which is very useful for downloading big games. Due to the presence of DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI 2.0 ports, Steam Deck can output to multiple monitors with a choice of 4K 60Hz or 1440p 120Hz in addition to the usual FreeSync support.
I would like to know if the official docking station fits peripherals like deck mate, any future improvements to the keyboard would be greatly appreciated. I found the keyboard to be a bit unwieldy, so it’s nice to see Valve make the typing experience on a touchscreen or touchpad a little more believable. Additional language support will also be obtained, with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean added soon.
read more: Yes, you can use your Steam deck as a computer (here how)
However, Valve didn’t reveal any details about the offline mode improvements. This mode basically does what you’d expect, but it’s not the deck’s best feature. Unreliable offline mode It kinda kills the portability of things like decks. Problems like this don’t just plague multiplayer games.Many users found the problem single-player gamesand heaven help you if you have games de nouveauAs if we needed another reason to piss off the notoriously nasty DRM software.
But the tedious offline mode is just the hellish fun of the Steam Deck experience so far. It’s good to see Valve working out the production kinks.
