Another round of Steam Client Beta updates are here with Steam Deck and Desktop PC seeing lots of improvements and bug fixes, and it's especially nice for people using Bluetooth on Steam Deck.
Steam Deck Specific changes:
Show battery information for connected Bluetooth devices under Settings->Bluetooth and in the Quick Access menu.
Added a per-device toggle to Settings->Bluetooth that controls whether a device is allowed to wake Steam Deck from sleep.
Fixed a bug that would cause the UI to show stale data for Bluetooth devices.
Kinda sucks with multi-homed devices like my pixel bud pros because it constantly wakes up the deck until i disconnect them, so this is nice fix being able to toggle devices.
I use my deck every day whether I'm just half playing an idler or plating something more engaging but my power button is struggling. I've done a bunch of the "fix it at home" things so I just hope it doesn't become completely unusable... I could send it back for repair but then I'd be without my deck for weeks...
Per-device Bluetooth wake is huge for me! My main earbuds have Multi-Service Support and if I forget to turn off Bluetooth on my deck it always wakes up when I take the buds out for something else
Same, recently on a work trip I finally got in to my hotel and found my steam deck hot and on 1% battery. My headphones had woken it from sleep earlier in the day and it had sat there burning itself away. This is great news.
Doesn't this essentially integrate similar functionality to what one of the Decky plugins had been used for? Great that it's an official feature now, in any case.
Sort of, if you mean the controller tools one. I believe when that was working it would show battery percentage. The Bluetooth plugin does not. So this is more general.
It also brings the feature of waking the deck via Bluetooth which is super convenient if you use it docked.
I'm trying not to get my hopes up, but they have been making a lot of changes targeted at the docked experience lately, and I have a theory that is because they are getting close to announcing a Steam Deck Controller.
Wake via Bluetooth isn't new, the OLED model has always supported it (the LCD doesn't due to hardware). This just lets you disable it for specific devices that you don't want to wake the Deck.
I'll check it when I get home if no one else has. I know the Decky plugins controller tools worked for checking the battery in my stadia controllers before, so I'm hoping this will have replaced the need for that plugin.