PC Plus reports that Nintendo and Sony might end up with an unlikely competitor in the handheld console market. The site talked to Dell's global gaming chief Abizar Vakharia after the launch of the company's XPS 710 H2C, a new high-end gaming machine that features a liquid cooling system, an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 processor overclocked to 3.2GHz, and dual GeForce 8800 GTX graphics cards. When asked about a potential Dell handheld gaming device, Vakharia reportedly "looked serious" and replied, "You know, that's definitely one that's on the radar screen, but we have no plans to talk about anything today." PC Plus reckons the device might turn out to be a souped-up Ultra-Mobile PC. That wouldn't be entirely surprising, considering early promotional material for UMPCs showed the devices running Halo.

So... battery life? Aren't those UMPCs running a single-core relatively low-performance CPUs? Oh well...