This.

Unless they can somehow pull a handheld out of there ass that has better hardware, cheaper price, and more high profile games than the 3DS, and poor a ton of marketing money into it, they'll fail to make even make a tiny dent in the market. It would make Vita look like the Game Boy. Heck it would make the NVidia Shield look like it's actually a part of the race.

They already have a mobile device called windows phone.

What I would like to see is an affordable xb laptop like the ones ben hack makes but rather than 3k per device have it at 500....

I travel a lot and it would be nice to have a 15" laptop x1....

Forever no.

The handheld market can't even support two products right now.

MS has smartphones/tablets to release games on. They don´t need a dedicated handheld device.

Doubt it would work. Right now, the handheld market is more unstable than the console market. Besides, Microsoft needs to focus on pushing the Xbox One ahead. There is no need for them to go handheld.

I would welcome another handheld in the market, as the niche once filled by the PSP is gone. I don't expect it to happen though.

Yeah.

It'll be called the Surface Pro.

It could be done, but not in a way that they would actually do.

Needs to be :

i5-level 7" tablet with 8GB ram and advanced iGPU, 2K screen, full XB controller support, $299 + XBLG (subsidized by subscription cost), immediate porting of the 360 library @ $5-$20/ea per title. Mini-HDMI output, wireless N/AC, LTE support. Performance level near XB1 and basically capable of running all XB1 titles @ 720p by porting via DX12. Run Windows 9 'gaming edition'. Make deals with verizon/etc to bundle them with contracts w/free Windows phone.

It could be the transition device to get out of the costly money-sink of home consoles. Microsoft has failed consistently to achieve their visions and goals. The impetus to join the home console battle was a supremely ignorant and ludicrously stupid attempt to stall potential competitors from threating them via the living room, when in point of fact their real threats came from mobile and premium/cloud challengers in the form of Apple/Google.

Think about this : Microsoft could have never made an Xbox AT ALL, and be better off now by a fairly huge margin. What has it ever done for them? They already owned the PC/Laptop/Server markets, nobody was capable of challenging them there, not even Apple to be honest (whom was saved by Gates ironically). The 'brand' boost, is an illusion at best, as Xbox achieving mediocrity on a global scale couldn't make their Zune, their Phones, or their Tablets more than a footnote in each area.

So anyway, if they ARE planning on doing anything at all, they need to get creative and drop their 'smash head into wall repeatedly' strategy of the last 15 years in terms of devices.

Microsoft as a software/services company? MAD PROFITS / SUCCESS
Microsoft as a devices company? THE ENRON OF TECH