Three hundred fifty dollars for a handheld built around a Snapdragon 720G, a mid-range phone chip from two years ago, and the pitch is that you are not really supposed to run games on it at all. Logitech partnered with Tencent, wrapped a 7-inch 1080p screen and a comfortable Xbox-style controller around it, and shipped the G Cloud as a device that leans almost entirely on Xbox Cloud Gaming and GeForce Now to do the actual work. The bet is that the future of portable play is a thin client with a good screen and a great battery, and that the box itself does not need horsepower because the horsepower lives in a data center.
| Feature | Snapdragon 720G | MediaTek Helio G90T | MediaTek Dimensity 800 | Samsung Exynos 9611 | HiSilicon Kirin 810 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Process Node | 8nm Samsung | 12nm TSMC | 7nm TSMC | 10nm Samsung | 7nm TSMC |
| CPU | 2x A76 @2.3GHz + 6x A55 @1.8GHz | 2x A76 @2.05GHz + 6x A55 @2.0GHz | 4x A76 @2.0GHz + 4x A55 @2.0GHz | 4x A73 @2.3GHz + 4x A53 @1.7GHz | 2x A76 @2.27GHz + 6x A55 @1.88GHz |
| GPU | Adreno 618 @750MHz | Mali-G76 MP4 @800MHz | Mali-G57 MC4 | Mali-G72 MP3 | Mali-G52 MP6 |
| 5G Modem | X15 LTE (4G) | Integrated 4G | Integrated 5G Sub-6 | Integrated 4G | Integrated 4G |
| ISP | Spectra 350L (192MP) | Good (64MP) | Strong computational | Decent | Strong (40MP+) |
| AI | Hexagon 692 | Strong APU | Good APU | Decent | Da Vinci NPU |
| AnTuTu v8 (approx) | ~280,000–300,000 | ~290,000 | ~320,000+ | ~220,000 | ~280,000 |
| Positioning | Gaming upper mid-range | Gaming mid-range | Early 5G mid-range | Budget/mid-range | Mid-range flagship killer |
I like the hardware more than I expected to. The screen is sharp, the thing is light, the battery is rated at twelve hours because a 720G barely sips power, and the controller feels closer to a real Xbox pad than anything you strap onto a phone. For sitting on a couch streaming Halo from Game Pass, it is smoother than the Steam Deck’s cloud setup because you just open a game instead of fighting a desktop OS to get there.
Here is where I lose the plot. It costs the same as a Steam Deck. The Steam Deck is a full PC that plays your entire library locally, no subscription, no signal required. The G Cloud plays almost nothing on its own, and it does not even have 5G, so the moment you leave Wi-Fi, the whole premise collapses, and you are holding a $350 paperweight with a lovely D-pad. Cloud gaming is real and getting better, but tethering a dedicated $350 device to it while shipping no cellular radio is a strange line to draw. A recent Samsung phone and a forty-dollar clip-on controller do everything this does, fit in a pocket, and ring when your mother calls.
The strategy I can at least respect. Logitech looked at the handheld surge, decided it did not want to lose money on silicon it could not make competitive, and bet that streaming would let it skip the arms race entirely. Own the comfortable front end; let Microsoft and Nvidia own the compute. That is not a dumb thesis. It is just a hard sell at this price against a device that asks nothing of your internet connection.
I am not going to write off cloud handhelds as a category, because the idea has legs and someone is going to nail the price. This is not the one. If Logitech had shipped this at $249 with 5G, I would be a lot more interested. At $349.99, tethered to Wi-Fi, sitting on a shelf next to the Steam Deck, I keep asking who exactly this is for, and I do not have a good answer.