“I would say it’s bringing the best of Xbox and Windows together, because we have spent the last 20 years building a world-class operating system, but it’s really locked to the console,” says Ronald. “What we’re doing is we’re really focused on how do we bring those experiences for both players and developers to the broader Windows ecosystem.”

Microsoft has said that it plans to bring the best of Xbox and Windows gaming experiences for handheld devices.

Ronald explained that Microsoft aims to bring a console-like experience to handhelds and "make Windows great for gaming" on any device. Microsoft will have more details to share later in the year, Ronald said, adding that the idea is to move away from a Windows desktop setup on handhelds and toward a "gaming-centric" experience.

The future of Microsoft's handheld gaming plans includes a marriage between the best of Xbox and Windows. That's according to Microsoft's Xbox hardware veteran Jason Ronald, who also teased that the company would have "a lot more to share later this year" on what exactly its Windows-powered handheld vision might look like.

Last January at CES, Microsoft chief marketing officer Yusuf Mehdi declared 2024 the “year of the AI PC.” And whether you believe that prediction came true or not—many new PCs come with AI-accelerating neural processing units onboard, but far from all of them—you can't deny that Microsoft did try very hard to make it happen.

The last time I tried playing games on Windows handhelds, it was a weird process. For all the flexibility of Windows and the freedom to run multiple app stores and customize however you'd like, a lot of things act weirdly and are very hit-and-miss.