14 DAY TRIAL // One of the most interesting devices expected to be seen at the rapidly approaching E3 trade show is the Nintendo 3DS, the handheld that is being developed by the Japanese giant, set to be launched before the end of this fiscal year. The problem with the 3DS is that, aside from a sparsely worded official announcement made in February, Nintendo has not talked about the gimmick at all, leaving the media space clear for rumor and speculation to spread freely.
Now, IGN, quoting several developers who spent time with the Nintendo 3DS even before Nintendo was forced to admit that the device existed, are saying that the new platform has significantly greater computing power than the Nintendo Wii home console and that it can power gaming experiences closer to those seen on the Xbox 360 from Microsoft and the PlayStation 3 from Sony.
It's not clear how the company managed to cram so much gaming power in such a small package but it’s pretty clear it is not using the Tegra mobile chipset developed by NVIDIA.
The big selling point of the Nintendo 3DS will be the fact that it can offer three-dimensional gaming experiences without the use of any specialized glasses, like those who are currently required to see 3D images in games and movies. It's not yet clear how the new handheld will achieve this feat but in order to do it, the gadget will need to render every videogame scene twice from a slightly different perspective, requiring better hardware than the current generation DS.
Nintendo will show what the 3DS can do at E3 and a Japanese launch is expected before the end of the year. It has also said that the new platform will be backward compatible and the launch price should be somewhere around 200 dollars.