The advent of smartphones have more or less made handheld gaming devices rather redundant. Unless you are a ‘fan’, handheld gaming devices these days don’t find too many takes. The likes of Nintendo and Sony persisted and somehow kept the category alive and now Qualcomm wants to shake things up.
At its Tech Summit event, Qualcomm showcased a platform that’s truly designed for handheld gaming devices and went on to announce its all-new Snapdragon G gaming platform. There’s also the Handheld Developer Kit to make things easier for developers to optimise or create new titles of new categories of devices.
The first chip under the new Snapdragon G is the G3x Gem 1. It comes onboard with features such as Adreno GPU with Qualcomm Elite Gaming features, support for 5mmWave, thermal management, stereo haptics, Snapdragon Sound and more.
The Razer-developed Handheld Developer Kit also comes with interesting hardware such as a massive 6.65-inch FHD 120Hz OLED panel, advanced thermal system with a fan for sustained performance, 5G connectivity, 4-way speaker system, dual microphone, built-in controllers with haptics and 6000mAh battery.
As of now, the device is meant only as a reference point for developers and OEMs. However, it does offer a glimpse of what Qualcomm may be planning. These are just normal specs when it comes to a good gaming smartphone, but the real deal is that it runs an Android operating system unlike the Nintendo Switch or Steam Deck which runs some version of a custom operating system that’s designed to take advantage of their own closed ecosystem only.
For instance, the Nintendo Switch has its own ecosystem that mostly relies on developers (including first-party titles) and gaming studios making games or at least optimising games specifically for handheld devices. The same applies to Steam devices where it takes PC gaming to a relatively compact form factor.
What could make a difference is the Android operating system. The operating system has become almost synonymous with mobile gaming. It has also got several triple-A titles including popular ones like BGMI, PUBG: New State, CoD Mobile, etc. Then there are games that take advantage of Vulkan and OpenGL offering top-notch graphics performance. The operating system is continuously pushing boundaries by offering games that offer up to 144Hz refresh rate and 60fps.
Another aspect of this is that OEMs are already focused on offering the best possible gaming performance from their smartphones and some even have dedicated gaming smartphones. For instance, Asus ROG Phone, BlackShark, Realme too have their GT line and similarly, iQoo is also known for making good devices that offer good gaming performance.
The new Snapdragon G3x chip will enable these OEMs to build a handheld gaming device based on a familiar platform that both the companies and users are accustomed to. The games are already there, just a little bit of optimisation can change the whole scenario of handheld gaming. And that’s what Qualcomm seems to be betting on.
The Handheld Gaming Kit is being aimed as a platform that will allow users to play console, PC and cloud games right on the device as it also supports Xbox Game Pass which allows players to play or stream games from Xbox Cloud, console and PC.
Whether the handheld gaming devices can make a comeback or not remains to be seen but Qualcomm certainly seems to have a plan for it.
(The author has travelled to Hawaii, US, on the official invite of Qualcomm)
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