No, and even if they did I can't imagine how it could compete. Hell the only one to really challenge Ninty in this realm was the PSP and it was still far less popular than DS

It's kind of crazy to think that in 30 years and dozens of attempts, only one handheld system not made by Nintendo has managed to find success.

A huge Nintendo/Microsoft partnership could really put this to rest and help both platform.

*rumors about Xbox gamepass coming to switch:
https://comicbook.com/gaming/2019/02/21/nintendo-switch-xbox-game-pass/

*Xbox Live is apparently coming to switch:
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-02-04-microsoft-plans-xbox-live-for-nintendo-switch-mobile

Add the Sega Game Gear, though that's mostly in Europe. 11M may not sound like much these days, but that was enough to compete with the Game Boy on equal ground for a while.

That's not true in the slightest bit.

Game Gear lifetime shipments-10.62m

Gameboy FY92 shipments-10.67m

Gameboy shipped more in the year that Game Gear launched than Game Gear shipped lifetime. This is even true for Europe.

It was doing miles better than the competition (Atari Lynx and PC Engine GT), though, which is why I meant to consider it, too.

It's main Problem was that Sega decided to focus entirely on the Megadrive/Genesis, thus leaving software support for the Game Gear pretty bare and mostly released Master System ports. After 94 it didn't sell much anymore due to this, those 10M came mostly just from the 2 first years.

And that when this happened the competitor reached a level close to older Ninty HH, but still was half of what Nintendo done that gen.

That was a gen that will be hard to match on total numbers.

DS = 155M

Wii = 102M

PS3 = 87M

X360 = 86M

PSP = 81M

Total = 511M

That may have been the reason that MS higher up was expecting 1B systems this gen.

I think the bigger issue is that it was $60 dollars more expensive (150 vs 90) and used 6 AAs which it burned through in under 5 hours vs the GB getting up to 30 from 4.  

That definitely didn't help either. Neither did the bulkiness of the system.

But like Nintendo later brought a smaller Gameboy Pocket (and 2 years later the even smaller Game Boy Light) which ran on only 2 AA batteries anymore compared to 4 before that, I'm sure Sega could have done something similar if they tried, but the Game Gear was too much out of focus for that. A smaller, leaner and less consuming Game Gear with longer battery life would have been perfectly possible by 1995.

I would say its biggest problem was the crappy battery life and it was expensive. Sega released a lot of games on it. HellI think they had more Sonic games (spinoffs included) than they had on Genesis