Portable XBOX?

Rumour has it that there may be an official announcement made at the E3 show this year about a handheld or portable console from Microsoft. These rumours are nothing new; an article from T3 magazine, complete with an artists impression of what the console may look like was around last year. However, as time has gone on, the possibility of a console from Microsoft to challenge Sony's PSP is starting to look a lot more plausible.

I certainly hope so. I have a PSP, and wonderful bit of kit that it is, there are some flaws which I hope Microsoft will take on board, and also Sony when they release the PSP's successor:

• A distinct lack of decent games! Good games for the PSP are few and far between, and seem to be almost exclusively targeted at the Japanese market.
• No second analog stick! This is a real pain, especially for FPS games, although these are in short supply on the PSP.
• Inadequate support for media files. Converting all my movies to the PSP supported formats is a bit of a pain, but tolerable considering the space saving benefits. But using any standard encoder to convert files of any format to a lower resolution would be much better. Support for QuickTime and DivX would be good, as would support for various audio formats, and the ability to organise media files into playlists and use in a kind of media player application would be much better - although I imagine this would be a given on a Microsoft system.
• Better external peripherals would be a massive benefit. For example, right at the beginning a keyboard was developed for the PSP. This never got released, and the fact that you have an extremely powerful piece of hardware in your pocket whose features you can't exploit for any kind of PDA functionality is very frustrating. Obviously a console is a console, however seeing as it is more than capable of running rings around most PDAs, extra hardware and software to enable you to use it as such would be awesome.

So, Bill, I hope you're paying attention! We'll have to wait and see what happens, but I'm already excited at the prospect of a portable XBOX! Imagine being able to play Halo on the train! :D