By now, I don’t think the release of a portable Xbox is a matter of if Microsoft will, could or should release a gaming handheld. It’s just a matter of when. In my opinion, Microsoft is kind of forced to release a handheld console, since both Nintendo and Sony have portable gaming machines already in the market, and what's more, these systems also interact with their respective next-generation elder brothers.
It’s because of all these facts that I decided to explore the possibilities of a portable Xbox. Below is what I’ve discovered thus far…
The Xbox Portable
No, that’s not the Xbox Portable. What you are looking at is obviously a mock-up I built based on what I, and many of you too, consider should be the basic set of features for a portable Xbox. From now on, I’ll simply call it the XP (Xbox Portable), since that Microsoft trademark will soon be phased out by Vista.
As you can see in the picture, I put in a thumbstick embedded into a d-pad, which also acts as a music player control; there’s also a full-featured QWERTY keyboard, a widescreen display, a trackball, and of course, the Xbox controller action buttons. There are some other things you don’t see in there that we’ll discuss later on.
This concept was inspired by the Nintendo DS Lite, which in my opinion offers a great flip case design plus it has that sexy iPod-like white finish that Microsoft incorporated into the next-generation Xbox. If you have seen “Pirates of the Silicon Valley”, you know the saying: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” I’m just a good artist...
But there’s more in that mock-up than meets the eye, and the external features are just a piece of the whole XP puzzle.
Some important questions came to my mind while putting together that fake Xbox Portable. Can the big black box be put inside a handheld? Should the Xbox portable focus on gaming like the Nintendo DS, or incorporate multimedia features like the Sony PlayStation Portable? Should Microsoft take advantage of its expertise in the mobile space and incorporate some other applications to this handheld such as those seen on Windows Mobile-powered Smartphones and Pocket PCs?
Throughout this article, we’ll find the answer to those questions so we can later take a side on every aspect of the XP. But before we move into answering those subjects, let me share with you some of the cool stuff I found on my way.
To write this editorial, I had to check in detail the handheld and mobile scene, and, while doing so, I discovered a wide range of innovative devices. Although I knew about some of them, like the recently launched SideKick III or the Motorola Q, there were a whole set of mobile devices that I never heard of. And if you are thinking about the Ultra-Mobile PC, let met tell you that there are a bunch of portable computers that are well ahead of the Project Origami developed by Microsoft, Samsung and Intel. Let’s take a look at the latest wonders in the mobile space.
