You might have read our latest News Nugget about the next handheld Nintendo platform, the tentatively-named Nintendo 3DS (I do want to clarify that, according to Nintendo, players won't need special glasses - I think that was a typo 
).
At the moment there's a great deal of speculation about this system and not a great deal is known. The information below comes from an attendee who was digging for information at the Game Developers' Conference:
- The system has two screens, just like the DS, but they are bigger and higher resolution. I’m sure most of you could have guessed that, but the interesting part is that the gap between the two screens is negligible. Developers will be able to use them as one giant screen. At the very least, this will allow for some awesome cutscenes. It also has some potentially cool gameplay potential, with developers shifting the action from dual screen to single screen depending on the situation.
- The next Nintendo handheld has an accelerometer. I blame the iPhone for this. Everything has to have an accelerometer now. Yesterday I bought a sandwich at the Moscone Center and it had an accelerometer in it.
- The dev kit is similar in power to the GameCube. Developers that worked on GameCube or Wii games will find it easy to create with. I found this information unusual. The DS successor is rumored to use an Nvidia Tegra chip, while the GameCube and Wii have PowerPC CPUs and ATI GPUs. The people familiar with the dev kit made it sound like there wasn’t much of a learning curve on the new system. I have to admit that I’m not familiar enough with Tegra, but I imagined developing for a system-on-a-chip platform to be different enough from developing for a CPU/GPU system. It could be ignorance on my part or maybe the DS2 uses something other than Tegra.
- The developers I spoke with will be finished with their games before the end of the year. The Nintendo DS is still going strong and the company could delay the next handheld’s release if it wanted to, but it looks like an E3 2010 announcement and a late 2010 release.
I think these comments are nothing too revolutionary. I have my doubts about the hardware performance capability, except that it's possible the system could share an API with GameCube and Wii.
The biggest point here is probably going to be the 3D display, although I imagine Nintendo have other as yet unannounced elements in the pipeline for this system.
Apparently the 3DS will be backwards-compatible with previous DS games, which is also pretty good. I just wonder if existing owners will want to upgrade to this system. It does seem though that, unlike the DSi, the 3DS is basically like a "DS2" - that is, it's a true successor to the DS rather than simply being a new form factor.
I never bought the DSi, mainly because I wasn't very interested in its extra features, but also because I have a DS Lite - the DSi didn't really offer me anything extra that was worth the cost.
But I'm pretty interested in the 3DS. What about you guys?
