Gadgetory

excellent what's up guys and welcome to Paul's hardware I had a new product arrived in the mail today or it was dropped off by a friendly delivery person and I decided to do a video on it immediately because it's new and exciting this is the steam controller was just distributed like today to people who pre-ordered it on Steam it's available in wide release in stores on November 10th but it also is an interesting product because it completes the Steam ecosystem for one you need not just the hardware to run the steam OS and the steam OS itself but also the steam controller for the ideal living game living livingroom gaming experience but you also have a $50 wireless controller with a built-in touchpad that you can use for Mouse control so even if you're not into the steam OS thing even if you have a windows-based or even Mac based gaming system set up already you can use this to control that in your living room and at 50 dollars it's very competitive with some of the other controllers out there on the market so let's go ahead and get started with an unboxing and then maybe I'll plug it into the arctic panther there behind me and do a quick demonstration so here's the box for the steam controller it's fairly it's it's actually all blue I wasn't expecting a blue theme to be going on here but as you can see steam controller on the front sort of another shot of it there on the back now this requires a computer with the minimum of Windows 7 Mac OS 10 dot 10 or steam OS running the Steam client and a free steam user account so you do have to have a Steam account as well as the hardware and let's just go ahead and get this out of the box starting by removing the sleeve and then oh no there's tape here on the corner I don't have my I don't have my my unboxing knife handy so I'm using scissors alright okay inside the box assuming that you open it in the proper orientation you have the steam controller right there looking all pretty it seems like fairly eco friendly packaging you also get a couple double-a batteries since it needs that to run the little USB adapter so you plug that into the computer and that gives you wireless connectivity and that's pretty no that's not quite it what else do we have is this adapter ah aha it's got so if you want to position the receiver someplace like you don't want to just plug it into the back here computer you want to reroute it and position it somewhere where it's going to get a better signal it comes with this little bit of stuff to do that includes a USB cable all right that's what you get in the retail box controller itself double-a batteries wireless receiver a little extendo cable which is just a USB micro 2 standard type a plug you can use that and it's got a little sort of heavier piece right here that you can sit on your desk and plug that adapter into and that will allow you to presumably if you assuming the deep there I will allow you to get yourself a little bit better positioning for receiving the signal and I'm imagining this is particularly gonna be useful for anyone who's got their computer kind of tucked away somewhere let's move all this aside and take a closer look at the controller itself so for 50 dollars you get an ergonomically designed controller it's got some sort of mat patches on either side there it's also got a glossy area there at the front these pads right here or touch pads so I'm the one on the upper right here is going to be the one that you primarily use instead of a mouse for example so use your thumb around that to guide the mouse across the screen and it works it sort of imitates the way a trackball would work to some degree it also has haptic feedback on that so it will Rumble and I've actually rumbles specifically where your finger is which is unique I also have a joystick right there which is a very similar joystick to say for example the Xbox 360 controller steaming button at the top is going to immediately launch steam if you have your computer up and running play and pause or forward and back buttons what have you X Y a and B and all of these buttons are individual individually individually controllable and adjustable using the steam software so you can reassign those and what-have-you it's also got these little trigger pads here on the inside so as you wrap around as your fingers I'm kind of gripped to click those you also have some some triggers here at the front right there don't feel too bad and then of course your your bumper pads there at the top and bottom so a similar layout and a similar sort of button arrangement then that you would get with say for example an Xbox 360 controller and there they are side by side if you wanted to give a little comparison of the sizes however you do get the addition of those those touch pads at the top and I think that's one of those things that people will find very interesting and useful also nice that they've distributed the weight from the batteries a little bit better whereas with Xbox 360 you got this pack it's right there in the middle with the steam controller they've moved that off to the side let me go ahead and pop those on right now since I have it available so little release thing there pops that off that's again also is where you have a couple buttons available via those paddles and then we just got to take our batteries and pop them in alike so Dada oh and hey it already started up and made a little little BP sound for me there we go there's the steam controller I'll put back together with the batteries in and I will say with the batteries in it gives a little bit more heft a little bit more weight and oh oh that's kind of fun it's not recognizing that it's connecting to anything right now but even as I just started pushing it was already giving me the haptic feedback but there's a quick unboxing and assembly and a closer look at the steam controller itself what I'm going to do for you guys now is actually plug this into my system back here and let's give gta5 a shot I'm just loading up a quick demo you guys and also sorry I'm further away from my microphone now so I might sound a bit more distance but I got the controller dongle plugged in steam ran an update and next up immediately the text that you have this the dongle for the controller plugged in I'm going to turn the controller itself on now as well and then it pops up and says hey if you're using a steam controller you might want to run big picture mode because it thinks you're going to try to do this in a living room and big picture mode is kind of what that's designed for you can tell not to do that again if you don't always want to run big picture mode if you're just connecting it to a basic home system for example I'm just going to hit close for now but actually right now I do want big picture mode because what that will do is update the steams of the controllers firmware since this is like early run of this chances are it doesn't eat firmware updates so I'm going to tell it's update real quick and then it's going to update new firmware is being installed do not power it off might take a minute bla bla so let's give it a sec and then we'll come back and show you how it works so big picture mode is loaded up my firmware update is finished and right from the get-go I think this is one of the things people are really gonna like which is that the right track pad here has a little bit of haptic feedback and it works the mouse so as you can see mouse cursor is on the screen and by just rotating that around it actually moves the mouse cursor around not too difficult so I mean it works as you might expect a trackpad - and that little bit of feedback it gives right underneath the touchpad is actually it feels pretty good for kind of like knowing that you're actually moving the mouse around or whatnot of course you can use other buttons on the controller to navigate around a steam the steam a less big picture mode as you might have before but let's go ahead and go into the library and play some GTA there we go I think I'm curious about with GTA with this game is that GTA is one of those games that if you haven't watched me play before when I had live streamed or whatever I typically move back and forth between using a controller which I use when I'm driving because I find that to be more effective means driving back to mouse and keyboard whenever I'm on foot whenever actually I have to aim and shoot because I definitely prefer the mouse to aim and shoot I don't think this is going to take the place of a mouse just for for accuracy when it comes to aiming and shooting but I do think that it might provide especially for a playing from a livingroom experience on the couch where you might not necessarily have a mouse easily accessible a nice kind of in-between or you know a replacement for that but when the mouse isn't as available and I died okay um guys this is not meant to be a full review of this controller since I just got it I want to spend a lot more time with it so first impressions I like the feel of it it doesn't feel I don't know durability wise construction wise it's like on par maybe just slightly less durable feel than the Xbox 360 controller but again I've only just barely started to use it I like the feel of it it's definitely comfortable to use positioning of the X Y a B here is a little bit you have to get used to going towards that at first and then the trackpad here has different functions so depending on what you're doing the trackpad might act a different way so in some in some cases it tries to mimic the analog the right analog stick and in other cases it tries to mimic like a mouse for example I will say that when aiming with this right now was pretty difficult especially when you're comparing it to mouse or a keyboard it was defaulting to the auto aim thing in GTA 5 which is like okay by me but honestly it you know you want the accurate position of the aiming the one thing from the reviews I've read of this so far is that there's a learning curve to it getting used to using it in different situations getting used to win you know this is going to act like a mouse versus otherwise but guys that's all for this video this is the steam controller I will be doing some more coverage on this some more coverage on the steam machines I actually want to put together steam machine and run the steam OS on here so I can give you guys more feedback on my experience of that thanks for watching this video don't forget to hit the like button subscribe to my channel for more videos just like this one or if you're interested in what I've got going on in my garage here since it is a work in progress things are looking better but I still have some unfinished touches as you might notice thanks for watching though and we'll see you next time