I sort of noticed there has been a boom for handheld PC after Steamdeck launched. Within this year, we go “big” three such as Rog Ally, LegionGo and SteamDeck.
My wandering mind is like, why not, why didn’t this happen say, 5 years ago. Is it because handheld CPU are now fast and power efficient to run full desktop operating system?
We had laptops for the longest time, say Era of “Intel Core 2 Duo”, were there handheld PC at that time? If we had laptop, could there be smaller form gaming device running linux/windoes?
It’s not because the low power laptop CPU was not powerful enough for a desktop os, for example handheld PC’s have been able to run windows for a long time (even in the mid 90’).
It’s because
Handheld PCs for years weren’t very powerful and were very expensive and not meant for gaming (especially the other alternatives were the Intel atom and the Intel celeron (or using a transmeta CPU, if the manufacturer felt funky). Technically some of those handhelds (like the Samsung q1) were able to game tho only early 2000s games.