To preface: Do not get me wrong, I'm quite intrigued by the idea of what is essentially a handheld gaming PC.DarklordKyo said:
My scepticism is not born from the makers trying to do that, but from the claims they are making, which IMO are dubious at best.
They claim the device will be powerful enough to run just about any game on the market, up to and including something like Metro: Last Light. But the most recent specs I could find say it will have an AMD G-series "Steppe Eagle"[footnote]Near as I can tell, the only difference between the basic and pro version is that the latter has 8gb ram and 128gb storage, as opposed to 4gb and 64gb[/footnote], a now 2-year old system-on-a-chip that combines CPU/GPU and was introduced for mobile and medical devices. It is roughly equivalent to an AMD Radeon HD8400. A quick look at benchmarks of games released around the same period [http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-HD-8400.93720.0.html] shows the gaming performance of that card is not brilliant.
They promise 5 hours of battery life, which is possible, but very unlikely for any serious gaming. You'd be hard pressed to find a full-size gaming laptop which can last that long while under any heavy cpu/gpu load. The Vita and 3DS can hit 5 hours, but those devices and their games or optimized for portable play.
They promise an ambitious concept for its controls, combining the haptic touchpads like the Steam Controller's with these interchangable buttons and thumbsticks you can connect to the touchpads. A really intriguing idea, but so far it seems entirely conceptual and the makers have yet to give any clear description of how it would actually work, let alone any working product[footnote]In fact, they haven't shown a working anything yet. Doesn't inspire a lot of confidence.[/footnote].
Now, the kind of performance we can expect from its hardware is actually reasonable for a $300 handheld and it would be well suited for simpler indie games, older releases or probably emulation too. Those interchangeable pads basically giving you the rough control layouts of older consoles seem to hint at the latter. But you probably won't be doing any AAA gaming on it. That promise seems very hard to keep with those specs and that pricepoint. Unless they achieve it by streaming, similar to the Nvidia Shield.
