A well-built Android gaming handheld with a disappointing focus on cloud streaming
I’ve been PCMag’s home entertainment expert for over 10 years, covering both TVs and everything you might want to connect to them. I’ve reviewed more than a thousand different consumer electronics products including headphones, speakers, TVs, and every major game system and VR headset of the last decade. I’m an ISF-certified TV calibrator and a THX-certified home theater professional, and I’m here to help you understand 4K, HDR, Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, and even 8K (and to reassure you that you don’t need to worry about 8K at all for at least a few more years).
The Logitech G Cloud is a nicely constructed, emulation-friendly handheld with an emphasis on cloud gaming, but it's overpriced for what it delivers.
Logitech’s intentions with its G Cloud gaming handheld are right in its name. The Android-based system focuses on cloud gaming, with an emphasis on services like Nvidia GeForce Now and Xbox Cloud Gaming. The cloud streaming experience proved laggy in our tests, so it’s fortunate that the G Cloud's modest specs, excellent display, and rock-solid build quality make the handheld a capable device for local streaming and emulating retro systems. Even with these advantages, the G Cloud has one significant weakness. This is a $349.99 device, so it costs almost as much as the significantly more powerful, $399.99 Valve Steam Deck (and almost twice as much as the $199.99 Editors' Choice Nintendo Switch Lite). The G Cloud is a nice piece of equipment, but it’s a bit misguided, underpowered, and overpriced.
The G Cloud sits somewhere in design between the Steam Deck's wide, full-gripped profile and the Nintendo Switch Lite's flat, simple body. It measures 4.6 by 10.1 by 1.3 inches (HWD), with a largely flat face and a back surface with gently curving grips. The face holds a 7-inch touch screen flanked by pinhole mics and a standard set of physical controls: dual analog sticks placed off-axis from each other, a direction pad, and A/B/X/Y face buttons in the Xbox configuration (A on the bottom). It also has Start and Select buttons, as well as Home and G buttons for navigation.
The handheld's top edge features two bumper buttons and two analog triggers, along with a power switch, a volume rocker, and a micro SD card slot covered by a plastic door. The bottom edge has a USB-C port for charging, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and two slots for the built-in speakers.
The device feels fantastic to hold. The grips contour naturally under the hand, and all of the controls are readily accessible under the thumbs and index fingers. G Cloud is narrower than the Steam Deck, so it’s a bit more comfortable to hold. The plastic shell also feels more solid; the Steam Deck doesn’t feel flimsy at all, but its body feels a bit more spread out and less dense than the G Cloud.
The G Cloud runs Android 11, with Logitech’s own handheld gaming frontend built on top of it. It’s a friendly-looking, simple interface with a row of recently opened apps in the middle, a quick-launch bar under it, and a system tray near the top. You can swipe and tap the touch screen, but the menu is designed for physical controls. This is especially apparent if you go into the settings menu; the touch screen doesn’t work there, so you must use the analog stick or direction pad.
The “cloud” part of the G Cloud is apparent as soon as you set it up. The handheld interface puts the Nvidia GeForce Now, Steam Link, and Xbox Game Pass cloud gaming apps in front, with Chrome and YouTube after it. You can access the Google Play store, and load whatever apps you want. However, the handful of Logitech preinstalled apps truly highlight the device’s priorities. This was made to be a cloud gaming device.
The handheld's interface is a bit overly simplified, especially if you want to use emulators. It disables the swipe-from-left/right gestures, which are how many emulators reveal the system menu when there’s no dedicated back button (the G Cloud lacks one, too). You also can’t open the notification tray by swiping down or go home by swiping up. Thankfully, the G Cloud has a dedicated home button.
Fortunately, you can switch from the G Cloud's handheld mode to stock Android 11 experience, and there you'll find the standard Android app gestures work. That interface isn’t designed for physical controls, so you’ll have a better time tapping and swiping the large display.
Speaking of the screen, it’s excellent. The G Cloud has a 7-inch, 1080p, 60Hz IPS touch LCD, and it’s bright and colorful. It’s also significantly sharper than the Switch and Switch Lite’s 720p display, and the Steam Deck’s 1,280-by-800 screen.
The G Cloud uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 720G, a fairly modest processor that lags behind Qualcomm’s 8-series chips in terms of power. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 720G's performance falls short of the Steam Deck’s Zen 2-based CPU and RDNA 2 GPU muscle (see the performance section below). In addition, the G Cloud has a scant 64GB of onboard storage, though the microSD card slot ensures that you can load as much as you want on the handheld.
Since it’s focused on cloud gaming, the G Cloud has a full suite of local wireless connectivity, including dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi with 2X2 MIMO and Bluetooth 5.1. It doesn’t feature Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) or the upgraded Wi-Fi 6E that will be included in Razer Edge tablet, though. There's no word on a 5G cellular version.
The modest processor helps with the G Cloud’s battery life, at the least. According to Logitech, the handheld can last up to 12 hours, twice that of the Switch Lite and (at its best) the Steam Deck.
Cloud gaming is ultimately reliant on network performance, and all the client device can do is offer the best possible connection hardware it can on its own end. After that, it’s up to the Internet connection, and that’s where cloud gaming often runs into problems. I have a gigabit (“up to” gigabit; realistically closer to 600Mbps downstream) cable connection from Spectrum, which only gets around 40Mbps upstream. My router is no slouch, either, and it’s located in the middle of my apartment, right next to my desk. It’s not the absolute best consumer connection available, but it’s still better than most users’ situations.
I played Hollow Knight and Middle-Earth: Shadow of War via Xbox Cloud Gaming, and while both games reliably loaded, they weren’t as responsive as they should have been. Shadow of War was playable, though I couldn’t nail the parry timing as reliably as I can when playing the game locally on my Xbox Series X. It also looked a bit fuzzy, like the stream was compressing the video a bit to wring as much responsiveness out of it as it could. Hollow Knight also wasn’t particularly sharp, and the game's much less forgiving timing meant the service's slight input lag completely threw off the crisp, responsive feel that makes the title work so well.
Local gaming is a different story from cloud gaming, though, and using Steam Link to play games remotely from my gaming laptop on the same Wi-Fi network felt far better. Shovel Knight Dig looked much sharper than the Xbox Cloud Gaming titles, and the controls were close enough to how they would feel playing directly on my laptop. In fact, they feel snappier than playing a console game on a TV in a non-gaming picture mode (which is typically around 80 to 110 milliseconds of input lag).
The G Cloud's relatively modest specs are enough to satisfy emulation gamers up to the sixth console generation. I easily loaded AetherSX2, Dolphin, and PPSSPP on the G Cloud using the Google Play app store. I then mapped the physical buttons and set the default directories for my disc images that were located on a microSD card. Both steps were easy, and I began playing Kirby Air Ride for the GameCube and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 for the PlayStation 2 after only a few minutes.
The graphics for both games were crisp and rock-solid (the GameCube game more so than the PS2 game, due to an ongoing bit of fuzziness inherent in emulated PS2 games). They felt responsive, and the G Cloud’s Snapdragon 720G maintained framerates between 50 and 60 frames per second. That’s far better than the Retroid Pocket 3, which struggles to play said games at a lower resolution (though to be fair, the Retroid Pocket 3 also costs just over a third of the price of the G Cloud). And, of course, if the handheld can run GameCube and PlayStation 2 games, it can play Super NES, PlayStation, and pretty much any fifth-generation-and-earlier console game with ease.
There is an unfortunate hiccup with the G Cloud’s interface when using emulators, though. It’s easy to add any emulator to the handheld mode’s quick launch bar, but once you’re in an emulator you’ll have a hard time navigating it. As mentioned earlier, the handheld mode disables touch-screen gestures, such as swiping from the edge of the screen. The gestures are enabled in tablet mode, but then you have to deal with the default Android interface that is less friendly toward physical controls, and looks less streamlined than the handheld view.
I fired up Genshin Impact and ran into two other problems. First, the Snapdragon 720G struggles a bit with the game. It runs smoothly in low and medium settings, but going higher than that makes the system chug.
More importantly, Genshin Impact doesn’t detect the G Cloud’s physical controls and requires using the touch-screen controls (it’s not as good as using the analog sticks and buttons). This is likely more of an issue with the game’s relatively recent and very spotty support for physical controls on Android, but if you want to play Genshin Impact on a handheld game system, it is a concern.
The Logitech G Cloud is a study of contrasts. It looks and feels great, and has a respectable, though not impressive, amount of power. It's more than capable of being a satisfying emulation-based handheld, but a few quirks in the handheld interface makes it a bit awkward to run those emulators. It was also designed with an emphasis on cloud gaming, which offers widely variable experiences based on factors outside of the device’s control. Plus, the system is expensive for what you get.
The G Cloud is a worthwhile portable gaming system if you want to emulate games or have the magical combination of network conditions to make cloud-based gaming feel good, but it falls far short of the Steam Deck’s flexibility and processing power. The Retroid Pocket 3 can’t run GameCube or PlayStation 2 games acceptably, but it emulates earlier game systems for a fraction of the price. There’s also the upcoming $399 Razer Edge tablet that features a larger, higher-resolution screen, Wi-Fi 6E connectivity, a convertible tablet form factor, and a much more powerful Snapdragon G3x processor. It will likely have a similar learning curve, but on paper it’s far more device for the price. The G Cloud is a nice piece of hardware, but it needs streamlining and a price reduction before we can give it a strong recommendation.
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I’ve been PCMag’s home entertainment expert for over 10 years, covering both TVs and everything you might want to connect to them. I’ve reviewed more than a thousand different consumer electronics products including headphones, speakers, TVs, and every major game system and VR headset of the last decade. I’m an ISF-certified TV calibrator and a THX-certified home theater professional, and I’m here to help you understand 4K, HDR, Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, and even 8K (and to reassure you that you don’t need to worry about 8K at all for at least a few more years).
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