If you have the means, and it’s available in your region, and you like PC games (or would like to like them), then I would highly recommend it.
I’ve had mine for nearly a year, and I’ve been impressed with it in multiple ways:
- It has a ridiculous number of control options:
- Two analog sticks (with capacitive touch sensors)
- A d-pad
- Two capacitive touch pads with haptic feedback.
- Four face buttons (A,B,X,Y) in their proper order.
- Two shoulder buttons.
- Two Analog triggers.
- A menu and an overview button.
- A Steam and an overflow button.
- These are probably the biggest miss. They’re functional, but they’re very mushy.
- Four paddle-style buttons on the back, similar to the Steam controller or an XBox Elite controller.
- A touch screen.
- Gyroscopic controls (usually activated by touching both analog sticks at the same time)
- All of the controls are configurable per-game, with many pre-made schemes provided by the community.
- It runs Linux, but you really don’t need to worry about it.
- You can switch to a desktop mode, open a terminal, etc. if you want, though.
- It mostly just works.
- The vast majority of games I’ve tested work without tweaking anything.
- There are a decent amount of built-in tools to adjust if you’d like, and even more flexibility if you install community add-ons.
- It’s compatible with a ton of games.
- Over 8,000 have been marked fully verified or playable.
- This number will likely continue to increase.
- There’s no vendor lock-in.
- While it works best with Steam and that is the default, nothing stops you from installing games from Epic Games Store, GOG, Humble, etc.
- There’s an active community of projects, for example:
- Emudeck, a collection of tools for installing and managing emulators.
- CryoUtilities, a collection a tools and tweaks to improve performance and reliability.
- Decky, a plugin manager for various additional functions.
- It’s a great companion to XBox Game Pass.
- There are even instructions provided by Microsoft on how to set this up.
- You can install Windows if you want.
- I haven’t done it, and I’m not sure why you’d want to do it, but it’s an option
- It’s surprisingly serviceable.
- It gets a 7/10 on iFixit.
- You can get (better) replacement sticks and (upgraded) SSDs.
That’s probably enough praise for now. It’s a pretty cool device.