A recent trademark filing has once again thrown up speculation that Apple may be moving into the gaming arena with a new handheld device.

The filing, which was made on February 5th, protects the Apple trademark in relation to, "hand-held units for playing electronic games; hand-held units for playing video games; stand alone video game machines; electronic games other than those adapted for use with television receivers only; LCD game machines; electronic educational game machines; toys, namely battery-powered computer games”.

Does that mean the company is preparing to produce a handheld, gaming-focussed device? Well... quite possibly not. Clearly it's something that has at least flickered across the minds of Apple executives, or the filing would never have been made. It's by no means uncommon, however, for a company to make such filings to simply cover their bases. We may have to set our sights on the psx4all homebrew for now...

SPOnG has contacted Apple for comment and will update you as and when we hear anything.

^{Source: Trademork}