Xbox Wants To Bring A Console Experience To PC Handhelds In 2025

In December, it was announced that Xbox's "VP of next generation" Jason Ronald would be appearing on a PC handheld panel at CES 2025, and that's what happened last night - although nothing major was revealed for Xbox specifically.

In fact, the interesting bit for Xbox fans came after the event, as Ronald sat down with The Verge to discuss his team's desire to integrate console "innovations" into Windows handhelds in order to make navigation less finicky.

Ronald says that we should be hearing more about this later in 2025, but ultimately, the gist is that Xbox wants Windows PC owners to feel much more comfortable using their system - with the goal of delivering a "premium gaming experience".

Here are a just a couple of quotes from the interview:

“...we have spent the last 20 years building a world-class operating system, but it’s really locked to the console. 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.”

"Our goal is to put the player and their library at the center of the experience and not all the [Windows] work that you have to do today.”"

As you're probably aware, Xbox has already indicated plans to build a handheld device at some point, but Ronald didn't go into any detail about this during the chat. For now, the focus is seemingly on existing Windows handhelds alone.

That comes as no real surprise, as Xbox boss Phil Spencer recently mentioned that his team wants to be "informed by learning and what’s happening now". In other words, it sounds like they want to work closely with the current (and upcoming) handhelds on the market before committing to an official first-party device. Makes sense to us!

It should also be noted that Ronald didn't refer to Windows handhelds alone during this interview, but rather Windows as a whole, suggesting PC owners could be set to benefit from more console "innovations" this year as well.