Microsoft dips fingers into handheld war.

Microsoft has taken the bizarre step of getting involved in the ongoing handheld war between Sony and Nintendo. Speaking with apparently no hint of irony at a Halo 2 Backstage Pass event in Seattle last week, Microsoft Xbox executive Peter Moore said that given the dominance Nintendo enjoys in the field, Sony’s launch was “like developing your own little operating system and saying, ‘Well, I’m going to challenge Windows’,”. Seeing a rather nice looking pie and wanting a slice for itself was something Microsoft did not so long ago by entering the Xbox in the great console race, although that thought doesn’t seem to have occurred to Moore.

Speaking about whether he thought it would affect home console sales, Chief Xbox Officer Robbie Bach was a little more reserved than Moore, saying: “I think, in general, it’s different than our [console] business”. He elaborated by suggesting that no one had yet found a convincing link between having a console and having a handheld.

Sony will be hoping to change all that though. With the multi-media centre that is the PSX already on the market and the PlayStation 3 rumoured to have wireless networking built-in as standard, their vision of the future of home entertainment is clearly one which involves lots on Sony products working together and the PSP, with its own wireless features, will feature heavily in that.

Bach was keen to point out that the launch of the PSP could actually have a positive effect on Xbox sales as Sony’s all seeing eye may well be temporarily be diverted from the home console market in 2005 as it attempts to wrestle market share from the handheld leaders Nintendo, “If Sony is distracted by way of a war with Nintendo, that’s fine with us”.