Without a doubt, Nintendo's DS and its various updates and upgrades (DS Lite, DSi, and now the DS XL) were among the world's most popular portable gaming solutions ever, the tiny console managing to help Nintendo get very well through the economic crisis (that and some pretty spectacular Wii sales back in 2008 and early 2009). However, the current platform has been around for quite a long time, and pretty much everyone's already talking about the necessity of a major overhaul, not just in terms of hardware, but of marketing as well.

In other words, everyone's waiting for the DS 2, a seriously improved mobile gaming platform that will manage to survive on a market where the iPhone is becoming a more and more popular solution for games on the go (especially now that the new 3GS has proved it's powerful enough to run a ported version of the Unreal engine).

Analysts are also convinced that an upgrade is about to happen in the near future. So, EEDAR (Electronic Entertainment Design and Research) analyst Jesse Divnich stated within a research note quoted by Edge-Online that “We believe that due to the aging technology, the possibility of new competitors in 2011, a decline in publisher support and piracy, Nintendo will launch a successor to the DS within the next 15 months, and likely announce such in the next eight months.”

Apparently, this statement is backed by some reports from the Japanese press, Japanese newspaper Asahi quoting Nintendo president Satoru Iwata as declaring that the successor of the current DS will sport “highly detailed graphics, and it will be necessary to have a sensor with the ability to read the movements of people playing.”

Of course, for the time being, we're only talking about speculations, bits and pieces of information, analysts' opinions and hearsay. However, the basis of this discussion remains valid, and we hope Nintendo will decide to move on to a more advanced portable gaming solution as soon as possible.


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