The landscape of handheld gaming PCs today is much different than when the Steam Deck first launched. All the hardware and spec drama aside, your choice basically boils down to one of two parts.
Your device is either power efficient or powerful enough to actually let you play games for hours on the go, but it runs SteamOS or some Linux variant, making it only usable with a small subset of games, and it will You're locked out of certain games. Biggest title. Or, you get what is essentially a mini Windows laptop that pretends to be built for gaming, but you miss out on the transformative features of SteamOS and Linux and the battery life they bring.
At CES 2025, we're starting to see these two areas converge, but Microsoft is looking at what's next for this combination.
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Microsoft has commented several times in the past on its intentions to build a handheld gaming console. But will it be a pocket-sized Xbox, a handheld Windows device, or something entirely different? Well, it sounds like the answer isn't clear.
Jason Ronald, Microsoft's vice president of next generation, spoke to The Verge following this week's AMD and Lenovo events at CES 2025. Ronald revealed what many who follow the handheld space have long suspected: Microsoft wants to bring the seamless console experience of the Xbox to Windows, rather than bloating it with programs designed for desktop and office use.
“We've been innovating in consoles for a long time, and as we work with the industry, what we're really concerned about is how do we take the innovations that we've incubated and developed on consoles and bring them to PC PC space. They went into handheld gaming,” Ronald said.
How this will manifest, however, remains the real question, and Ronald is certainly in no rush to share details, which is entirely understandable given the development timeline for the mysterious Xbox handheld.
“I would say it combines the best of Xbox and Windows because we've been building world-class operating systems for the last 20 years, but it's really limited to consoles,” he added.
This particular event is also significant and worth remembering. That's where the Lenovo Legion Go S was announced, the company's second-generation handheld running SteamOS, positioning it as a direct competitor to the Steam Deck and the first third-party handheld to use Valve's modified Linux operating system computer.
It's unlikely that the Xbox handheld will run SteamOS, or dual-boot between Windows and Linux. What's more likely to happen is that Microsoft will hopefully fine-tune the Windows experience enough to make it work on a handheld device. This was of course Ronald's suggestion.
“We're focused on really simplifying it and making it more of a console experience,” Ronald said of the Windows experience on handheld devices. “Our goal is to put players and their libraries at the center of the experience, not all [Windows] Work to do today. “
Ronald rightly points out that the Xbox operating system is ultimately a variant of Windows, so the idea of having the console experience run on different devices isn't weird or even impractical. The good news is that we'll start seeing some of these efforts later this year, likely long before we see the Xbox mystery handheld device.
