Hands-On Windows 168 transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:00]:
Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to take a look at the new Xbox full screen experience for this new generation of gaming handheld PCs.

TWIT.tv [00:00:12]:
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWIT.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:22]:
Hello everybody and welcome back to Hands on Windows. I'm Paul Thurad and in this very special episode of Hands on Windows, we're going to do something a little different. You may have heard that Microsoft is evolving the Xbox platform. It seems like the next generation of the consoles is going to be PC based, right? And actual PCs, meaning. And the preview of that is out now. So back in October, Microsoft and Asus released the first generation of what's called Xbox Ally gaming handhelds. And so these are those all in one form factors with a screen in the middle and two controller halves on either side. It's running Windows 11, but it's a stripped down version of Windows 11 and instead of booting into the traditional desktop, it boots into the Xbox app.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:13]:
Right. Which we know that Microsoft has been improving over time in Windows 11 specifically for this scenario, as it turns out. So, so I don't have an Xbox ally an Asus device, but what I do have here is a Legion Go two from Lenovo. So this is a bigger but similar gaming handheld. And to make sense of this, let me show you what this looks like. So I have it set up on a mount here. I don't want to move it. It's got a bunch of stuff going on.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:46]:
Normally you would hold this and just play it normally, but you can see it here and it's about an 8 inch screen. This is the Xbox app loaded. It's got a USB port at the top through which the power and the dock are occurring, power button, et cetera. So you can see on the left there is half of a controller essentially like you would see on an Xbox. And on the other side is the other half of that controller. And it might be hard to see, but right there at the bottom is actually a little trackpad, which is kind of a nice concession to the fact that this thing is a PC. So what we're essentially looking at here is a tablet, right? It's a little thick. That's actually pretty thick.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:24]:
It's probably about an inch thick. This is not a thin, light MacBook Air type computer, but it has AMD Zen 5 internals, 16 or 32 gigs of RAM, different amounts of SSD storage depending on the model, et cetera.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:40]:
Well, it's technically a 1080p plus, so it's 1920 by 1200. I actually have it a little lower for the screen recording. So the screen is actually a little less tall than it typically is. It's usually 1920 by 1200. But I just wanted to get an idea for the hardware. Battery life, I would say is not great. We're probably looking at about.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:02]:
Somewhere between two and three hours on average. And let me just get this back to my normal video. And from here what we'll do is go into.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:13]:
The machine itself and so we'll be looking at the.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:17]:
Screen, such as it is. So I actually do have it connected to a dock. There's a mouse and a keyboard connected, but I'm not going to use those for this demo. I'm going to use an external controller. And the reason I'm doing that is because it would just be awkward for me to grab the screen up where it is the sides of the controller so you can connect to Xbox controller. It works normally. So the way that this works is when the computer boots, it boots into this app, which is the Xbox app. So this is the new home experience.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:45]:
You can run Windows apps in this full screen experience. So if I launch settings like I did using a keyboard shortcut, in this case it's actually running full screen. You see, there's no controls or anything there. And if I go down to gaming, you'll see there's this new section here for this full screen experience and it's set to Xbox. The other choice is none, in which case it just boots normally into Windows and you can determine whether it does that or not. And also whether it gives you some nice hints because some of the keyboard shortcuts or in this case, button, short button, I guess they're button combos are a little bit difficult to just know. And so it will give you a little bit of a prompt to let you know. But one of the things you can do so on the controller, if you hit and press and hold on the Xbox button, which is the white lit up button, you get this new Task View experience.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:36]:
And it works just basically like Task View does normally in Windows 11, except it works with the controller. So I can use the right bumper or left bumper to go back and forth between all the running apps. I can actually go down and just launch into the Windows desktop normally. So if you want to get out of this, you can do that. I'll just go back. Oh, no, actually let me go back to Xbox because that would be the normal experience. So I'll just do that. And so from here, it's your basic launcher.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:04]:
Right. We have access to all of the games we got through Game Pass if you have that subscription. I do have Game Pass ultimate, so I've got the kind of the full meal deal over there, access to my library. So these are the games I've downloaded to the device, grounded to Forza Motorsport, the recent Doom game, Call of Duty, of course, and Alan Wake. Just because I've never played through it, I wanted to kind of check that one out. But there's also this view up here which I think is really interesting, where you can go in and you can see your own apps. In this case, these are third party PC game stores, Epic Games Store, Steam, of course.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:42]:
Ubisoft, rather GOG, Battle.net, which is, I think it's technically part of Microsoft these days, but whatever. And the idea here is that you can install these stores, install the games you want to play, and when you do, those things will show up in my games here alongside your Xbox games. Right. So it's not limited just to the games you get through Microsoft. So that's pretty cool. Other than that, it's pretty much a standard Xbox app experience. If I just tap on that window or, sorry, Xbox key, you get the game bar, which is also. It's not really full screen per se, but it is an overlay.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:19]:
You only get one widget or view at a time. This is what's called compact mode, actually. And there's a couple of additional things in here in addition to, you know, what you typically see on a Windows PC. And you can go down, for example, you get the power menu. So if I want to shut down the computer, I can do it right from here. I never have to go to the desktop or never have to use a mouse or whatever, which is kind of same thing with networking, Bluetooth, you know, for connecting, controller, airplane mode, and then other settings. And the other settings are actually. These will be familiar because if you've ever used this, because these are all the same settings that you get in Game Bar on a typical PC.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:54]:
You also get to go to the Settings app from here. But I've already done that, so there's no reason for that. Let me bring that back because I didn't show you everything yet. So you get Game Assist. This is the mini version of Microsoft Edge web browser. So you're playing a game if it knows the game. If it knows it can help you with the game, but will actually preload with content about that game. So it can get going helping you.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:14]:
If it doesn't, you can just use this for a search as you would anywhere. The social stuff. These are the people who are your friends and so forth. Gaming copilot this is brand new. I think we talked about this sometime in the past couple of months. Same thing as game assist in a way, but more proactive and I think over time probably more powerful where if it recognizes the game that you're playing. I'm not playing a game right now, but if I were, it would say, hey, I see that you're playing Call of Duty. I see you're having a hard time at this part of the level.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:43]:
Do you need some help getting through here? That kind of thing. And then just other controls related to volume capture. This is for screenshots and for video capture in gameplay performance.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:56]:
You can see. Yeah, I mean this thing's doing pretty good. So I'm just. I actually do have Call of Duty running in the background, interestingly, but it's using a lot of the ram. But as far as cpu, gpu, not too much right now because we're just running the Xbox app and then Xbox Chat. And this is just a list of all the widgets, which are those views that you can display as part of Game bar. Okay, so that's probably most of it, but first, here's a quick message.

Leo Laporte [00:08:29]:
Hey there, it's Leo Laporte, host of so many shows on the Twit network, thinking about advertising. In 2026, we host a network of the most trusted shows in tech, each featuring authentic post read ads delivered by Micah Sargent, my co host and of course me. Our listeners don't just hear our ads, they really believe in them because we've established a relationship with them. They trust us. According to Twit fans, they've purchased several items advertised on the Twit network because they trust our team's expertise in the latest technology. If Twit supports it, they know they can trust it. In fact, 88% of our audience has made a purchase because of a twit ad. Over 90% help make it and tech buying decisions at their companies.

Leo Laporte [00:09:14]:
These are the people you want to talk to. Ask David Coover. He's the senior strategist at ThreatLocker. David said Twitch hosts are some of the most respected voices in technology and cybersecurity and their audience reflects that same level of expertise and engagement. It's the engagement that really makes a difference to us. With every campaign, you're going to get measurable results. You get presents on our show episode pages. In fact, we even have links right there in the RSS feed descriptions.

Leo Laporte [00:09:40]:
Plus our team will support you every step of the way. So if you're ready to reach the most influential audience in tech, email us PartnerWIT TV or head to TWiT TV Advertise. I'm looking forward to telling our qualified audience about your great product.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:59]:
Now, as far as the gameplay experience goes. Now, normally, obviously I would boot into this thing. I would launch a game, Call of Duty. If you've ever played it, it takes a long time to come up, so I have already got it running. I'm going to assume it's going to work well, but let's give it a shot, see if we can get in there. And when I was originally looking to do this episode, I was thinking, how am I going to do this? Like what exactly? How exactly? Could I show you this? I was going to do a remote desktop thing, but I figured that would kill the frame rate. But actually looking at this now, I can see it's killing the frame rate regardless. So usually on this device I get between, I'd say 50, 55 and maybe 75 frames per second.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:41]:
That's at 1920 by 1200. So it's possible this is due to me.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:49]:
You know, changing the resolution of the screen. It's not running at native res. It may be a little bit, you know, confused by that. But I will just get this thing kicked off the thing. One of the things that's really nice about this particular device, meaning the Lenovo, and for this I do have to come up here and push the button, is they have this interface up here for just going through all the aspects of the PC. So from here I might say, you know, I really want this thing to be on, you know, high performance mode or something, or you can just kind of go through the various settings and then just get right out of it again. Right. And so it's just kind of a quick kind of handy side menu here, which is now not exiting.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:26]:
There we go. But yeah, so I'm looking, I can sort of see one of the things I did use that interface for was to get it to display the frames per second and then the latency in milliseconds up at the corner. So actually I can see now it seems like it's recovered a little bit. So it looks like it's in 60 somewhere. We're not in a game or whatever. But this is the basic experience. One of the other things that's unique to this particular device, which I don't believe is true, the Asus Xbox Alley devices, is that those Controllers are removable and so you could play them, you know, play with them detached like you might with a Nintendo Switch, which I would never do because I'm an adult. But you could also use one as sort of a first person shooter mouse.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:08]:
So it has like kind of a high precision mouse capability where you could roll it on the table and then use the keyboard. Your other hand with the keyboard. You know, in the old kind of classic PC style, I play games with a controller. So I, when I play on this, I use the two sticks and I use the, you know, the D pedal, the buttons, whatever. It's, it's pretty standard.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:27]:
This particular device also doesn't have that Xbox button. So I've been using the Xbox button on my external controller. But you can go through that software I just showed you and program. They have extra, they basically have several extra buttons in here. So you can actually program any of these buttons to bring that thing up. If you are going to participate in that Xbox ecosystem, I think as the game, or as rather as the hardware is updated to support this Xbox platform, this new full screen Windows thing, it will go. So I'm not going to, I'm obviously not going to play the game, but I just wanted to kind of show you like actually it's running, it's 70 frames per second. It's, it's doing good.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:08]:
So that's good. Like this, this is the type of thing that would have been very hard to show you, you know, with a remote desktop, of course, but in this type of thing it's, it's very good. Just let me get out of there before I destroy my, my KD ratio or whatever. And then I, I'll just back out all, all the way over the game here. And it's funny because it says, you know, quit to desktop, which is normal for the PC. And you're like, yep, but it's not going to quit to the desktop. It's going to quick to the Xbox experience. I haven't run this in a little while.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:40]:
I'm kind of curious what this will look like. It will say it's not been optimized. Right. So yeah, in this particular case, I think because I screwed up or screwed around with the.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:50]:
Native resolution, you know, these games were already optimized for the screen and now it's like, what is this thing? This looks different. So it's trying to load. But you get the idea that it's. If anyone who's been in the Microsoft ecosystem for a long time, if you go back 20 years plus you might have used Media center or Tablet PC Edition. And one of the problems with Windows at the time, XP Media Center Edition, was that it was an overlay on top of Windows, which this sort of is.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:18]:
But what would happen is you'd be in the middle of a. Well, watching a TV show or whatever content, and as, as you were just using it, a dialogue box would pop up and, you know, you'd be sitting there with a remote and you couldn't click the dialogue. And so one of the things that Microsoft's trying to solve here is that windows should be 100% controllable, or close to 100% as possible with a controller. Right. And in my experience, I have to say.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:45]:
They'Ve pretty much achieved that. I can't think of any. Well, every once in a while you do get a dialogue, actually. But because the. In this mode in particular, so you know, in the, in the original software that they ship, Lenovo does. It's. It's a PC. So it's kind of an awkward experience.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:05]:
You get that little kind of, you know, get the PC thing. So you get a dialog box and you do have to go to. You can use a little trackpad or whatever. But with the Xbox full screen experience, everything is full screen. And so even if there's a dialog box, you're still going to be able to access it with the controller. And let me get out of this thing and show you what that looks like real quick, because this is, to me is kind of the final piece of the puzzle in a way. I guess I did not exit that very well. Okay, so again, you exit.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:36]:
You go back to this. So I will use the mouse on the keyboard here for a moment just because I'm just trying to make the point. But if I use a shortcut like Windows key +E to launch file Explorer, it launches. And I've got the mouse attached. You can see the mouse cursor. So I can't drag this down. I can't click this to restore it. This is running full screen.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:58]:
If I. Then.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:01]:
I'm trying to think how I can do this in a way that makes sense. Yeah. If I just go to. Actually, let's go in here. So grab some. I'll grab all these images and if I copy them into the download folder, you'll see a file progress dialog appear. But it's not going to appear over this window. It's going to appear in its own full screen experience.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:19]:
So it's going to be up in the corner like it looks Like a window but it's actually everything that is running will run full screen. So this might be difficult on the same computer. It was too quick. Yeah, so I guess you'll have to take my word for that. But the way that it works when I do this like PC to PC actually let me see if maybe I can do that. I'll try to share it with my other computer if I do this over the network.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:46]:
And I will have to accept this here if it ever comes up. Let's see. Yeah, and so it did. And then when I do save. So you'll see now. Well actually it's appearing, it's not a file, it's not a file copy, dialog, nevermind. But these things, you know, it's full screen and you can access anything that appears on screen with the controller now. So I think they've done it.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:12]:
You know Windows is still heavier than Linux, right. So if you have a Steambox which is coming soon or a Steam Deck or steamos on whatever PC, you know you're going to have more resources to work with for games and so forth. Of course the games aren't going to be as compatible and you might not get the same performance. So this is kind of a neat in between.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:34]:
Experience where the performance is fantastic, you get the full compatibility with all the games. All the games that require the, the anti cheat technology like Call of Duty does for example all work which is a problem today on Linux. Still, you know the battery life is terrible. Right. You're not going to go on a cross country flight and play Call of Duty for five hours. Sorry, it's not going to work that way. Call of Duty we're looking at maybe two, two and a half hours of battery life. Some of the like Grounded two or some of the games that are lower impact will do better.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:03]:
But we're still, it's still three hours maybe at the best. So it's a, it's an interesting thing. It's. And I, I, I wrote an article about how to get this onto a computer today. You could actually put this experience in any computer if you wanted to. But really it's designed for These handheld gaming PCs where you have the integrated controller. So that's probably the better experience. So is Windows viable as of a handheld gaming platform? Yeah, you know, but I think there's still optimizations to come.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:37]:
Inevitably there'll be some little problems probably with dialogues and things like that where they might have to fix that. But I think this points the way to the future and I think this is what future Xbox consoles are going to look into, so hopefully you find this interesting or entertaining. We'll have a new episode of Hands on Windows every Thursday. To find out more at TWiT TV.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:58]:
Thank you for watching. Thank you so much to our Club TWIT members. If you're a member, thank you so much. We love you. If you're not, please consider joining and you can find out more about that at TWIT tv. Club Twit. See you next week.