Steam Hardware
A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Deck] - Steam Deck related.
[Machine] - Steam Machine related.
[Frame] - Steam Frame related.
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
If your post is only relevant to one hardware device (Deck/Machine/Frame/etc) please specify which one as part of the title or by using a device flair.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to Steam Hardware or Steam OS in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
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Is it one of those things that looks good on paper or is it actually useful in day to day playing?
It's useful for navigating menus in games/apps that are designed for keyboard/mouse. I can't say I ever use the touchpad in-game like you would the touchpads on the Steam Deck itself.
As someone with all Sony consoles... it's good, but even first party titles barely use it. Usually it's just used as a button, sometimes multiple (GT7 gives you turn indicators to the sides and emergency blinkers on the center, for example).
As a track pad it's honestly a perfectly fine one. That said! PS4 and PS5 ones are very similar from the point of view of pc gaming, you get the usb port to be a type C, haptic feedback instead of the ancient rumble motors and uh what dumb name they gave to the triggers... adaptive triggers? Cool tech. So in short right now you get rumble that works different and in the future will be better as games start to use it, a better usb, and triggers that only Sony games use right now.
For comparison the Xbox Series controller have the ancient rumble motors (so in other words Steam/Sony/Nintendo are haptic, Microsoft isn't) that every game has been using since the rumble pack/Dual Shock, it has no track pad, no motion sensor, and rumble triggers that are kinda dumb but in Forza Horizon 5 they are extremely good at making you feel the loss of grip. If you have no preference about the shape, Sony gives you the most advanced and complete hardware that will give you the full experience in titles that can use it, all for the same price. Downside, there's a shitton of stuff in there and the triggers have a motor each, so the battery won't last as long. Also pretty rgb lol.
I also have an 8BitDo one shaped like the Sony ones and it's good. Simple tech, barebones, works well. Less expensive.
Right now if I could have the perfect controller it would be the PS5 one but with hall effect sticks that are touch sensitive like the Deck's ones, plus the rear buttons. Damn near the PS5 pro controller tbh.