Valve's sudden announcement of the Steam Deck made gamers' eyes sparkle with anticipation, and many felt it was a true Switch Pro alternative. While I, too, was entranced by its clean contours and the concept itself, I passed on the $5 minimum required to pre-order. That's not because Valve's track record in hardware is shaky.

I feel that Valve did a lot of research and development to make the Steam Deck a solid piece of handheld kit, and the impressions by IGN show that. Rather, we feel that a hardware manufacturer with extensive computer manufacturing experience could sublimate the current concept and take it to its ultimate form.

An obvious candidate for a third-party Steam Deck would be Razer. A Singaporean-American design firm, Razer has established itself by creating powerful and sleek gaming laptops. Even the newly released Razer Blade 15 screams quality, albeit at a tremendous price. I feel that Razer is making the closest gaming laptop to the MacBook Pro.

The Razer Steam Deck would feature a sleek matte black package, an all-aluminum frame, a bezel-less screen, and tactile and satisfying buttons. Razer would also spend a lot of time and effort on energy management, tuning AMD's system-on-chip to find ways to extend battery life as much as possible.

In addition, Razer was one of the first companies to push eGPUs. eGPUs are external devices that can give a laptop the power of a desktop graphics card. Razer has been working on a new way to give higher gaming performance when playing on a TV monitor, with Razer may sell docks with more powerful GPUs built in to provide higher gaming performance when played on a TV monitor.

Personally, I would like to see a Steam Deck from a company like Samsung. The Korean conglomerate controls the rails of many component manufacturing.

A Samsung-branded Steam Deck would have an OLED display from Samsung Display, SSD, RAM, and wireless chips from Samsung Semiconductor, and speakers from Samsung Electronics. The stylish case could also be manufactured by Samsung-owned fashion brand Bean Pole.

Samsung itself does not have much experience in the gaming field, but its experience in the mobile field could be an advantage when designing a PC handheld for on-the-go use.

Asus, with its Republic of Gamers (ROG) brand, would also make an attractive Steam Deck. Aside from the uninspiring black and red color scheme, Asus has experience producing acclaimed gaming laptops and gaming phones; the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, with its dot-matrix laptop lid, caught the eye of TVs editor Brian Westover, who Phones editor Jordan Palmer said the Asus ROG Phone 5 is a "true marvel of engineering," even if the camera is mediocre.

The Asus Steam Deck will be a bit more angular, but will function with an over-engineered cooling solution to extract maximum performance from a narrow package.

The last Steam Deck candidate I'd like to see is the Xbox; the Xbox design team has done a great job perfecting the Xbox Series X.

I'd like to see a Steam Deck that is a little more compact, but not too much.

Seriously, the Xbox Series X delivers 12.1 teraflops of performance in a 6.86 liter case with a single fan. It is remarkably well built. What's more, the Xbox Series X costs only $500.

If Team Xbox collaborates with the Surface design team, the Microsoft Steam Deck could really be next-level: not only could it feature a magnesium body like the Surface Pro 7 Plus, but the Xbox design team is working with AMD and could develop a chip that is even better than the one in the Valve Steam Deck. In addition, such a device would have Windows 11.

When the Valve Steam Deck ships at the end of the year, Valve Steam Deck owners will have a lot of fun with their new PC handhelds. I wouldn't be surprised to see other Steam Deck announcements in the near future.