You can now order a Steam Deck and the all-new Docking Station, no reservation required

If you’ve wanted to get your hands on a Steam Deck but didn’t want to wait months, now is the time to place your order. Valve has announced that you can place an order without needing a reservation alongside two other big pieces of news. These include the official docking station now becoming available for order and lots of new software features to better round out the Deck experience. Head below the fold to learn more about these recent developments.

After being plagued by chip shortages and fulfilling the immense reservation list, anyone can now go and place an order for a Steam Deck through Valve’s dedicated website. For those who may not be super familiar with this mobile device or just need a refresher, the Steam Deck is a portable gaming solution designed by Valve to bring your favorite PC games on the go. It sports a 4-core 8-thread AMD Zen 2 processor, an 8-core RDNA 2 GPU, and runs Valve’s SteamOS operating system based on Linux. You can read up more on the specifications and different models Valve offers in our announcement coverage and you can see what we thought of it in our hands-on review.

While those who did place reservations had to wait for some time to get their hands on a Deck, those of us who were waiting for general availability can now too get our hands on one. The product page for the Steam Deck currently states the expected delivery date ranges from one to two weeks from the time of order and is in stock now. Valve even shared a video showing Steam Decks coming down the assembly line which you can see below. Do note that the demand could overwhelm the stock and certain models could revert to reservations to allow Valve to catch back up. The video in the main tweet was removed from YouTube but has since been re-uploaded.

Steam Dock Dock now available for order

Alongside the announcement of the general availability of the Steam Deck, Valve’s own docking station has now launched. The Steam Deck Docking Station was announced with the Deck and has seen some revisions between the announcement and launch, so let us break down what you get here. Designed to convert your Deck into a gaming station rather than a portable device, you will have access to three USB-A 3.1 Gen1 ports on the back for connecting drives and peripherals, a gigabit Ethernet port, an HDMI 2.0 and DisplayPort 1.4 outputs, and a USB-C power input. The display system supports Multi-Stream Transport which allows for multi-monitor setups and the outputs can be up to 4K60Hz or 1440p120Hz. FeeSync support is present to boot. All of this works over a single USB-C connection at the top of the Deck and the Docking Station ships with the power supply for the station, which happens to be the same one as comes with the Deck. The official Steam Deck Docking Station goes for $89 and has an expected delivery date of one to two weeks.

New software features

The final piece of news here highlights some of the updates and improvements made to the Steam Deck software over the last few months. These range from UI updates to overall system stability improvements. There are now quick links to Achievements and Guides on the overlay, the media page for your screenshots has been redesigned to be more performant, and night mode can be automatically scheduled. There have also been improvements made to the input controls with additional on-screen keyboard languages and responsiveness for typing and while using the trackpad. Sitting underneath everything, SteamOS, drivers, and firmware have all seen various updates to improve performance and stability with new and simpler update channels: Stable, Beta, and Preview.

gadgetnewsonline’ Take

The Steam Deck is widely known as being one of the best portable and powerful handheld gaming consoles on the market, and it is great to see that gamers can now just go out and order a Deck and get it within two weeks. While the Deck is an impressive piece of kit, I can’t wait to see what Valve has in store for a Gen 2 Deck in the future.

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