MSI plans to launch at least three new handhelds after the MSI Claw

MSI entered the handheld gaming market at CES 2024. The MSI Claw was one of the first handheld consoles to launch with the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H Meteor Lake processor. Other OEMs like OneXPlayer ($1,299 on Amazon) have followed suit, and it won't be long before others do the same. In an interview with IGN, MSI talked about its future handheld plans.

The Taiwanese electronics behemoth plans to launch a new version of the MSI Claw every "two to three" years. MSI wants to treat its handhelds like gaming laptops, and that's why it has chosen the gap between subsequent releases. It has supposedly drawn up plans for three MSI claw successors.MSI may also have mid-cycle refreshes baked into the roadmap.

Upgrades such as an OLED often arrive as a standalone device, and MSI could very well follow Valve's and Nintendo's footsteps here. Nevertheless, the "real" MSI Claw successor won't come until 2026, presumably powered by Intel's Panther Lake processors.

While MSI's commitment to handhelds is commendable, its future will entirely depend on how the first-gen Claw fares against the AMD-powered competition. Our in-depth Core Ultra 7 155H deep dive showed it to outperform AMD's iGPU king, the Radeon 780M, in synthetic benchmarks, but it failed to impress in gaming workloads. This is something Intel and MSI will need to correct via driver and firmware updates.