Seems a little too radical. The entire premise of Xbox since the OG Xbox in 2001 was paying for online with Xbox live. And Microsoft has never cared about making a handheld consoles despite Xbox fans pretty much begging for one for 23+ years.

Then again, considering how Xbox sales are going and just in general how little they care about hardware (keep referring to Xbox as a "service") ... Anything could happen at this point.

Just have my doubts when it comes to execution. Considering this is coming from the same company that just removed recently the ability to even login to windows with a local account and require an online cloud Microsoft account. Seems they've lost the plot / any real vision long ago.

I think a hybrid Xbox will be a much better idea since if they make the handheld as a separate version, it will have one of these two issues, lacking of games or bad gaming optimization if they decide to allow all xbox games to run on it.

Hopefully, HOPEFULLY Sony will follow and will make online play free without subscription too. The biggest FU! thing. I will not pay full price for online only game, then monthly fee to the game dev studio, and also monthly to Sony just to be able to use my own internet. NO!