Microsoft has once more made some loud noises about a possible handheld gaming device. Back in November of 2024, Xbox CEO Phil Spencer confirmed the company is “working on” a handheld gaming device, but said that it was “years out.” Now, speaking to The Verge at tech show CES, another senior Microsoft employee has given details over what could be a more PC-focused handheld device, and perhaps as soon as this year.
Jason Ronald, who has the excellent job title of VP of Next Generation, spoke to The Verge after a roundtable entitled “The Future of Gaming Handhelds,” where he suggested that Microsoft could also create less of a handheld Xbox, but more of a handheld PC offering an Xbox-like experience.
The distinction is clearly confusing, not least given the current generation of consoles are, essentially, closed-box PCs, and then further blurred by Microsoft’s current campaign suggesting that any internet-connected screened device “is an Xbox” via the company’s push to streaming. But Ronald appears to want to make a distinction, suggesting the goal of creating a handheld would be to use the company’s expertise gained over decades of making consoles, and bring that to a portable PC. “I would say it’s bringing the best of Xbox and Windows together,” the VP said told The Verge, “because we have spent the last 20 years building a world-class operating system, but it’s really locked to the console.”
The goal, it seems, is to bring the two together. Or, perhaps more frankly, to make Windows less of a pain in the ass to use on a small screen. It’s something Microsoft hasn’t traditionally been great at. Did you ever own a Windows-based cellphone? I did! Haha! It was so bad. Then remember Microsoft’s last big attempt, with Windows 7’s abysmal attempt to become tile-based, compromising its entire UI for the desktops everyone was using it on for the sake of portable devices on which no one was?
With every tech firm under the sun attempting to ride the success of Valve’s Steam Deck device and launching their own handheld PCs, Microsoft clearly wants a slice of the pie, but perhaps knows that Windows 11 wouldn’t cut it, and that it’d never be able to show its face again if it used a Linux-based interface. That’s likely driving Donald’s declarations of bringing the simpler UX of an Xbox to a Windows-powered portable. However, he’s being coy, telling The Verge “we’ll have a lot more to share later this year.”
However, what he has to say just now sounds awfully familiar. “I think,” Donald says, “at the end of the day our goal is to make Windows great for gaming on any device.” Which is a refrain we’ve heard countless times across countless iterations of the operating system. Each major new release comes with a major new push to make Windows so great for gaming, and none ever catches on. (Remember when Windows Vista launched, trumpeting a feature that would score your PC’s hardware out of 10, and believed the industry would publish games with a matching score so you’d know if it worked? No? Exactly.) And yet, bizarrely, Windows has always been the default OS for PC gaming, inevitably working far better the less Microsoft has tried to get involved.
But, as Donald points out, the Xbox OS is sitting on top of a lot of Windows’ code, so it shouldn’t be a herculean task to bring its tiled world across to a handheld device. Obviously it needs to be reworked for a PC such that it never needs a cursor input or a taskbar to be clicked, and sure, the Xbox already manages this, but that’s largely thanks to all the ways it’s defiantly not behaving like a PC, with its incredibly limited settings and locked-down nature. “There’s fundamental interaction models that we’re working on,” says Donald, “to make sure that regardless of the operating system details, it feels very natively like a gaming-centric device and a gaming-centric experience.”
So, the real message here is, forget about a possible portable Xbox for now, we could well be seeing a portable PC that feels like an Xbox within the year.
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