I would have preferred two touchpads, but the fact that they’re including one already sets them leagues ahead of the rest of the Steam Deck’s competition in the handheld PC market.
With how useful the touchpads are on the Steam Deck for navigating a desktop interface, I can’t imagine using a device without them.
Fully agree with you. Though I can’t imagine that a hardware company like Lenovo would be able to get two TouchPads working with games in any meaningful way; at least not without direct support from valve. Valve can only do it because they developed steam input with the two TouchPads in mind. Given Lenovo’s laptop experience I’d say the trackpad on this thing is likely just a mouse and can’t be configured as something else (which like you said is still a vast improvement over all these other non-steam deck handhelds that either poorly emulate mouse input with a joystick or worse don’t have any mouse control at all other than a touch screen). Though I guess Lenovo could have their own app that configures this stuff on its own. But I doubt that would come anywhere close to being as good as steam input. I also can’t imagine how cumbersome that kind of a solution would be; not to mention the almost guaranteed issues with game compatibility it would bring.
This seems like the right way to go for Lenovo imo without them having to invest in their own bloated software.
I would have preferred two touchpads, but the fact that they’re including one already sets them leagues ahead of the rest of the Steam Deck’s competition in the handheld PC market.
With how useful the touchpads are on the Steam Deck for navigating a desktop interface, I can’t imagine using a device without them.
Fully agree with you. Though I can’t imagine that a hardware company like Lenovo would be able to get two TouchPads working with games in any meaningful way; at least not without direct support from valve. Valve can only do it because they developed steam input with the two TouchPads in mind. Given Lenovo’s laptop experience I’d say the trackpad on this thing is likely just a mouse and can’t be configured as something else (which like you said is still a vast improvement over all these other non-steam deck handhelds that either poorly emulate mouse input with a joystick or worse don’t have any mouse control at all other than a touch screen). Though I guess Lenovo could have their own app that configures this stuff on its own. But I doubt that would come anywhere close to being as good as steam input. I also can’t imagine how cumbersome that kind of a solution would be; not to mention the almost guaranteed issues with game compatibility it would bring.
This seems like the right way to go for Lenovo imo without them having to invest in their own bloated software.
The position of the sole touchpad is a bit shit though. Valve really got it right with the Steam Deck.