MSI Claw hands-on: the Steam Deck rival with Intel inside

theverge.com:

By Sean Hollister, a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.

MSI just announced the Claw, a handheld Windows gaming PC following the Steam Deck’s lead. It’s destined to challenge the Asus ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go at the same starting price of $699 — only this one has an Intel Core Ultra inside, which MSI claims is the clear winner over AMD in performance and battery life.

I just got hands-on at CES 2024, and I can confidently tell you that as of right now, it’s impossible to say whether it’s any good — that depends on performance and battery life, which are not final. MSI is showing off engineering samples here at CES, ones that feel like they need the months of tuning they’ll hopefully get before a first-half 2024 launch.

Here’s the good news: if you like the Asus ROG Ally and wish it were just more comfortable and longer-lived, MSI might have you covered. The grips are bigger and comfier than Asus, without the overwhelming beefiness and dig-into-my-palms edges of the Lenovo Legion Go. In many ways, the Claw feels like it’s cribbed directly from the ROG Ally, save for those grips: it’s similarly shaped, with similar port placement (including an SD card reader right next to a vent), near-identical button placement, and similar screen bezels surrounding a similar 7-inch 120Hz 1080p IPS screen.

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The user interface feels cut from the same cloth and similarly needs creature comforts that didn’t come to the Ally for a while, like the ability to map an Xbox button, and anti-deadzone to counteract joystick oversensitivity in some games.

Importantly though, you get a 53Wh battery, which is larger than