Refresh features include:
OLED
HDR
90 hz
Better battery life (50wh vs 40wh)
Cooler
Lighter
Even better performance, even though not advertised by Valve! (because of the better DDR memory 6400mt/s vs 55000mt/s)
Bigger screen
Just watched the Digital Foundry review, unprompted by this post. Sounds like it's a dramatically better screen, and marginally better in every other feature. Better battery, better performance, cooler temps, lighter weight, better storage...this might be the time to jump on the Steam Deck train.
Based on my experience of the current Deck I'd say it's not for everyone, but for my use-case it's one of the best purchases I've ever made. If you've got a large backlog of PC games you've built up over the years, you're OK with a little bit of tinkering to get some of them working, and you want to play them curled up on the sofa, then this is definitely the device for you!
Way nicer from I’ve been told. I am fortunate that literally every game, including some obscure one from freaking 1998 just works. Some Reddit posts from years past hint it definitely had teething issues at first. Early adopter tax I guess.
The battery seems like better than a marginal improvement. Valve claims 30-50% longer battery life, but some early reviews are reporting better improvements than that (IGN reports that Cyberpunk went from 1.5 hours to 2.5 hours, same settings).
What the hell. Just a couple of months ago Valve was saying a new Steam Deck was unlikely for the foreseeable future, and I bought one based on that information.
They said a faster one was unlikely. This isn't faster, so, they were the best kind of correct, unfortunately. Are you able to return yours, by chance?
Depends. How techy are you? None of those games are officially supported on the Steam Deck, but Valve lets you dig around under the hood and install whatever you want. However, anything that isn't on Steam and officially supported will require some work for you to get running. That said, you can play just about anything on the Deck if you're willing to put in the time. The touchpads make the Deck very capable on traditionally kb/m games.
For what it is worth, I’ve had a few games that weren’t officially supported so I just turned on the Proton setting and it’s worked so far. Online multiplayer seems to be a sticking point though due to anti-cheat.