Alienware May Release Portable Gaming Device

[Peter_Brosdahl]

Image: Dell

It would seem that the success of Nintendo's Switch has inspired a PC counterpart. Dell has showed off a concept portable gaming device of their own at CES this week. Meet the Concept UFO.

From Dell's blog,

"Alienware’s primary mission is to deliver the most immersive PC gaming experiences possible, and our goal is to create a gaming PC worthy of the Alienware brand, in a handheld form factor that gamers could use to play their favorite AAA PC titles, wherever they are."

Some specs:

• 8" Screen
• A resolution of 1900x1200
• Detachable controllers
• Ability to connect to external display
• 10th Generation Intel Processors
• WiFi, Bluetooth, and Thunderbolt connectivity

 

[Eduardo_Domingot]

Pretty **** interesting but I need specs and I need a little more battery life.
Yes I am asking a lot but I am also being realistic about what It would take to interest me.

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

little more battery life.

On their blog they state long battery life is a goal but without numbers I wasn't going to include it in the specs.

 

[kin]

i wonder if steam's big picture mode would work well on a handheld. I feel like it should. I'm not sure about the rest of windows, uplay, origin, etc.

 

[Brian_B]

I dunno - seems like it will be horrible battery life (or very big and bulky) if they are trying to run natively at that resolution, on Windows OS, and keep any kind of fidelity.

As a streaming device maybe - a tie-in with Steam Streaming like the Link and it wouldn’t need a big CPU or battery ... although then you are tied to a desktop (or one of the various cloud services)

I guess — it’s been a few years, but the Switch only runs at 720 in Handheld, runs a bare metal OS on an ARM Tegra and only barely manages to get marginal battery life in this form factor. I find it hard to believe that Intel and Windows will do significantly better, even a couple of years later.

 

[raz-0]

On their blog they state long battery life is a goal but without numbers I wasn't going to include it in the specs.

Unless they have some secret technology at their disposal, I don't see how they could get more than maybe 2 hours in something that might be hand holdable. I'm not seeing how they can get a usable, performant, thermally unobjectionable unit in that form factor much less do so while squeezing in enough battery and/or efficiency to get long battery life.

 

[stickx911]

Get with launcher companies for lightweight versions. They have a lot to gain here too if they are successful.
I think 720p for portable PC would be more realistic.

Without any launcher platforms on board, they’re going to be gimped on content from the start.

 

[Burticus]

Interesting... but yeah I need to see specs and pricing before I get too excited about it. I like the 8" screen, my Vita screen was too small for me. And Switch isn't much bigger.

But the idea of an 8" gaming tablet with joy-cons that I could Steam/whatever or emulation on sounds interesting.