We’ve said it once. And we’ll say it again. Everyone and their mother’s uncle’s daughter’s cousin are making handheld consoles. This started with the Nintendo with the Switch, followed by Valve’s Steam Deck, the success of these two has prompted many others such as ASUS ROG, Lenovo, and Logitech, to come up with their own spin to handheld consoles. And now, we have a new player in town, the MSI Claw. 

Unveiled at CES 2024, the Claw is said to be comfortable, though performance and battery life remain to be tested. The draw to the Claw is it’s using Intel’s Ultra chip. Though, we’ll need to see more to determine the performance. Some reports online claimed the Claw has a few stuttering here and there, but they were quick to stress out that MSI still has months of fine-tuning the hardware. 

It has Hall effect joysticks, which are great. Hall effect joysticks essentially mean you won’t have to worry about drifting, an increasingly common and frustrating problem running rampant in modern controllers – with a wide range of first-party controllers from multiple colors and editions, it almost seems like the hardware makers refuse to address this issue in order to sell more, don’t quote me on that, wild speculation, but if you’re someone who has bought three or four controllers to replace the drifting ones, then you know where I’m coming from.

The MSI Claw will also have some AI capabilities to it, like automatically adjusting chip power and backlight, and AI noise canceling. But we’ll have to see more soon in the coming months. 

For now, the MSI Claw is a nice welcome to the market as it should keep other competing brands on the edge.