Phil Spencer 'Very Excited' About Xbox Handheld Plans For 2025

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With ASUS seemingly teasing an Xbox handheld last week, there's been a lot of talk about the device in the days ever since, and Xbox boss Phil Spencer has also teased something to do with handhelds happening in 2025.

In an interview with iJustine, Spencer mentioned that his team have "teased and talked" about handheld plans for this year, but stopped short of confirming anything specific.

Here's the handheld snippet from the interview, as transcribed by ourselves at Pure Xbox:

Host: Is there anything exciting that you can tell us to expect from Xbox this year?

Phil: ...we've teased and talked about handhelds and I'm very excited because we both travel, and sometimes you can't always take your console or your whole gaming desktop with you.

Elaborating on the wider strategy, Spencer insisted Xbox is about "the person" rather than the device these days:

But it's really about building the experience around the person, and that's what really gets me excited. [Xbox] isn't one single device at the centre, it's not one game, it is the player - making sure all of your games are available, all of your save games, all of your entitlements are available wherever you go.

Of course, the ASUS Xbox handheld isn't expected to run all Xbox consoles natively, but it'll support a large number of them via Xbox Cloud Gaming, while Xbox Play Anywhere will provide "free" PC versions for over 1,100 Xbox games.

With the Nintendo Switch 2 out in the wild, there's good reason for ASUS to act quickly - to capitalise on the controversy surrounding that device, and to ensure that potential Switch 2 buyers know there's another option for them as well.

As soon as we hear anything more concrete about the ASUS Xbox handheld, we'll let you know.