MSI Claw Officially Announced: It’s the New Steam Deck Competitor

It was no secret that MSI was developing its own portable gaming console. Finally, at CES 2024 the company officially presented MSI clawwhich joins a saturated segment of devices with Steam Deck, Asus ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go as standouts.

At first glance, the MSI Claw doesn’t look too different from its competitors. But what’s truly new is under the hood. Before us is the first console of this type, equipped with processors of the line. Intel Core Ultra.

This marks an interesting change of direction from the competition, given that Valve, Asus and Lenovo have all opted for AMD chips. But that’s not all, as the MSI Claw also comes with a much larger battery capacity.

It’s about the battery 53 Wh, versus Steam Deck’s 50 Wh, ROG Ally’s 40 Wh, and Legion Go’s 49.2 Wh. According to the manufacturer, the MSI Claw battery lasts up to 2 hours under extreme load. At the same time, its autonomy is 50% higher compared to the average of other options on the market. It remains to be seen whether this is indeed the case.

Key Features of MSI Claw

From a design perspective, the MSI Claw is nothing revolutionary. There is a screen on the front panel 7″ IPS touchscreen with Full HD resolution (1920 x 1080), 120 Hz refresh rate and 500 nits maximum brightness. If we focus on the controls, we find the presence of two levers, a navigation bar, ABXY buttons, triggers and buttons on the shouldersas well as a pair of programmable keys on the rear panel.

Of course, what really stands out about the rear is that it takes up almost all of it. ventilation grille. Meanwhile, the top of the MSI Claw features an SD card reader, volume rocker, power button with a fingerprint scanner and a 3.5mm headphone jack, as well as a USB-C port with support for Thunderbolt 4 and Power Delivery 3.0.

Storage options will depend on the configuration selected by users. The cheapest model will come with a 512GB SSD, while the most expensive version will have a 1TB capacity. The manufacturer’s idea is to launch three versions of MSI Clawall with 16GB of RAM.

Specifications table

MSI Claw still does not have an exact release date. The manufacturer mentions that it will be available in the first half of the year. As we indicated earlier, three models will be available, the most basic of which starts with US$699. A version with higher specifications will be sold in exchange for US$799.