Two of Xbox’s upcoming PC gaming handhelds have leaked.
As reported by videocardz, these leaks were traced from Indonesian certification, that were themselves traced to FCC certifications in the US.
The more powerful of the two handhelds is black, and will be powered by the Ryzen Z2 Extreme, carrying 8 cores and 36W TDP. The white model is using the AMD Aeirth Plus, the successor to Steam Deck’s Van Gogh SOC.
The top of the black console appears to have an HDMI port and two USB-C ports at the top. It’s possible that this console has support for an external GPU, using either the Thunderbolt 4, USB4, or OCuLink standard.
Windows Central’s Jez Corden took note of the fact that this black console also shows a prominent Xbox button. He believes that this is our first look at Project Kennan, the first official Xbox branded PC gaming console. Microsoft is planning to make an Xbox handheld of their own, but they want to start out by working with their PC OEM partners first. Subsequently, the white console is believed to possibly be the ASUS ROG Ally 2.
Of course, since Microsoft hasn’t shown their full hand, a lot of the details about these consoles are still open to speculation. Corden has openly talked about how Microsoft is planning to build their future consoles on Windows, as opposed to the more bespoke Xbox Oses they have been building from scratch for years.
Assuming the rumor is true, this approach could have both downsides and advantages. One big setback even PC gamers experience now is how poorly designed and optimized the Xbox app is for PC gaming handhelds. And so, the big hope or expectation is that Microsoft will address this with a new UI layer or menu to address this need.
But we can see it possible that these devices come without those issues being addressed yet. One potential upside to Xbox making their own OSes for all these years is how slowly it takes Microsoft’s Windows division to update their operating systems. Case in point, Windows 11 was launched all the way back in 2021, but one could say that it took only now for it to be essential for users to upgrade from Windows 8/10 to 11 today.
But if Microsoft is consolidating their OS efforts for some form of convergence, this may be the big unavoidable change that everyone in the company is adapting to. Microsoft just officially revealed their latest generation of Surface devices, so we now see that they’re well into working out a new game plan, and it fully incorporates AI. We expect that these Xbox/Windows gaming handhelds will be the same in that approach. With all that said, as unpredictable as Microsoft has been this year, we’ll just have to wait for their official announcements to know everything they have planned.
