Hello! Welcome back to the channel and this weeks episode of 180 Tech Chat. I’m going to jump straight into it because Qualcomm and Razer have teamed up and the collab looks ever so promising. 

It’s December, Did you order a Steam Deck? Well we did, it was meant to be arriving around now time and we are pumped, a nice early Christmas present. We mentioned the news a while back that they have been delayed, so nothings coming until February next year but since then, we’ve potentially got it’s first big competitor and it comes from Qualcomm and Razer. 

Qualcomm had an event this week, showcasing a number of new chips, one of which being the new Snapdragon G3X. Well, this new processor is set to be used with a brand new handheld gaming device from Razer. They showed off a developer kit based on the new platform and it looks awesome. 

Razer co-founder and CEO, Min-Liang Tan, said: “Razer is extremely excited to partner with Qualcomm Technologies and support them on their way to introduce new cutting-edge technology to the global gaming industry,”. “Together, Qualcomm Technologies and Razer will lead the way with new and innovative solutions that push the boundaries of fidelity and quality available in portable gaming, transforming the way these games are experienced.”

A bold statement indeed. When and where we don’t know and I cant anything mention release dates yet and we have to remember, this is just a dev kit to get us excited. However, some spec’s have been floating around the internet and how accurate they are, I’m not sure, so take this with a pinch of salt. We may have a 6.65” OLED display at 1080p, with 10 bit HDR and up to 120Hz refresh rate. A built-in 1080p60 webcam with two microphones, so maybe you could stream with it? You’ll be able to hook this up to an AR/VR viewer and/or send it to your TV or monitor as well. 

One thing that is interesting, storage is just 64GB but expandable with a microSD card. Not a lot, so is this a handheld streaming device, using Xbox Cloud OR will they offer more onboard storage or do we have to rely heavily on SD cards that won’t really give the performance we need to game.  

As for appearance, it looks big, it looks long and I think it needs some tweaks to make it look and potentially feel as look like something like the steam deck or switch. Some of those that attend the Qualcomm event did manage to get some time with the console and it does good.  

In other news, Battlefield 2042. They’ve released patch notes, stating some promising things to come but boy, the new update that came out yesterday I think, and it doesn’t let you look left or right. We play on PC so not sure if consoles are affected but we tried a few games last night and after trying multiple fixes, nothing worked and I could only look up and down. Utterly bonkers and they’ve managed to break the game even further. One thing worth noting, EA have put Vince Zampella, the CEO of Respawn Entertainment (they made Titanfall and Apex Legends) in charge of the Battlefield series. An internal shakeup might help things but any changes we do see, won’t be immediate. 

Just in time for Christmas, Tesla announces the Cyberquad, a child-size ATV that is available to purchase for a cool $1900 bucks. It resembles the Cybertruck, it’s suitable for kids 8 and older, it can hold a maximum weight of 150 pounds, its battery will last around 15 miles and it has a top speed of 10mph. Why not aye Elon, what kid doesn’t want one of these. 

Lastly, Icarus has just been released over on Steam, a new session based PVE survival game that can be played solo or group up with up to 7 of your friends. I played some of the beta for this and it was a lot of fun. If you like survival games, like the Forest, that was great, you’ll probably like Icarus. We’ll be playing and streaming, if you want to join in, I’ll leave a link below to our twitch channel.