14 DAY TRIAL // Nintendo is going out of its way to deny rumors about the imminent release of a "re-designed" Nintendo DS handheld gaming device which would sport not one but two touchscreens with improved input capabilities.
Apparently, every time the Nintendo DS sees a significant drop in sales, as it has seen in the final part of last year and in the early months of 2008, rumors start popping up on various fan sites about the plans that are already in place to create a new an improved product. It's kind of unfair to even call them rumors, as they are nothing but speculations which do not have even a shred of evidence to back them up. Nintendo always releases statements in which it points out to the extremely good sales numbers of its product while saying that at no point in time it has officially talked, within the company, about creating a replacement.
Now, there's more to the rumor of a two touchscreen DS because some reputed industry analysts, like Hirokazu Hamamura, who is the president of Enterbrain, a company that closely watches the Japanese videogame market, and Michael Pachter, from Wedbush Morgan, both say that a redesign is required. The Nintendo DS and the PlayStation Portable are currently engaged in a bitter fight for supremacy on the Japanese and the North American markets.
It would be cool to see a new Nintendo DS mainly because the device sorely needs an upgrade in processing power and because of the interesting new possibilities that a two touchscreen setup would allow for. We could probably see games which have a dual layered action, where you can control the game with a stylus or your fingers both on the top screen and on the bottom one.
Unfortunately, we'll have to wait a bit for a new Nintendo handheld as the rumor seems to be totally bogus at this point.