Between the Switch 2, the Steam Deck, and even the PlayStation Portal, handheld gaming is bigger than ever. Despite having some amazing games on the Xbox Series X and S, console sales this generation have been lackluster at best. Xbox has made a lot of gambles to try to stay competitive, such as Game Pass and making the biggest acquisition in gaming history with Activision Blizzard, but the question still remains how it will manage to regain its foothold in the industry after falling so far behind. One idea that has been teased many times concerns a dedicated Xbox handheld device that has many fans intrigued. Phil Spencer and the Xbox team are still playing coy with many details, but we do know a bit about what a likely Xbox handheld could be.
Release speculation
In an interview with Bloomberg, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer gave a few interesting tidbits about Xbox’s plans for a handheld. He said that the “expectation is that we would do something” regarding handhelds and that the company is currently investigating what that would exactly be through prototypes. However, the immediate goals for the team involve improving the Xbox app for existing devices. “Longer term,” Spencer said, “I love us building devices. And I think our team could do some real innovative work, but we want to be informed by learning and what’s happening now.”
If Xbox is still only in the prototype phase of development, any new handheld hardware would be many years away from hitting the market.
Xbox handheld rumors and news
The only concrete news we have about the Xbox handheld was the previously mentioned Bloomberg report.
Windows Central’s Jez Cordon claims to have insider information about a possible Xbox handheld announcement, though it does somewhat contradict what Spencer said later. According to Cordon on the Xbox Two podcast, “I don’t think you’re gonna see hardware at The Game Awards, but, I do think next year is a good year for revealing new hardware. Especially hardware you could hold in the palm of your hand.”
The Verge, reporting from CES 2025, published a story on a roundtable interview titled “The Future of Gaming Handhelds,” that included some interesting quotes from Jason Ronald, Microsoft’s VP of “Next Generation.”
“We’ve been really innovating for a long time in the console space, and as we partner across the industry it’s really about how do we bring those innovations that we’ve incubated and developed in the console space and bring them to PC and bring them to the handheld gaming space,” said Ronald.
Microsoft has made efforts to move Xbox apps to PC and handhelds over the past year — something Roland says we should expect more of over the next year as the company plugs away at its own handheld.
Price, hardware, and design
There’s no information to go off for the real meat of what an Xbox handheld could be. That makes it impossible to even guess at things like price without first knowing how powerful the device itself will be. In terms of design, most handhelds have fallen into a fairly uniform form factor since the Switch, and Xbox would probably not stray too far from that. Until we see otherwise, we imagine it will look very similar to something like Steam Deck.
