Saying they have crappy hardware does not mean what they make is low quality (high failure rate) but rather it is crappy as in it is obsolete 2-3 years before it is released.  

The gameboy was primarily black and white well into the 90s (it was great for the mid 80s, but was pretty seriously obsolete by the time it retired).  The Wii is, performance wise, quite similar to consoles from almost 10 years ago both in graphics and use of the DVD media (and lack of a hard drive), the N64 was behind the times before it came out with the very limited cartridge games...playing games like Resident Evil was a horror with all the things that were missing from the PS1 version.  You can't even think of playing something like Resident Evil 5 on the Wii so things have only gotten worse on the tech side.

   My point is that without being led by competition to the point where they're forced to at least TRY to catch up with current tech, they leave things in eternal obsolescence and charge full price because it's cheaper for them.

  I would not contend that Sony is vastly better on the handheld front.  I think going with the UMD minidisk format for the PSP was a stupid idea, but one probably born out of necessity (since when it came out there wasn't really the capacity for a download only handheld).  

  I would contend that Sony is vastly better on the console front.  With the addition of the motion controller for the PS3 there will literally be no good reason to buy the Wii except for a handful of first party titles that seem to get more and more rare every year.  I found the Wiimote to be great for a narrow range of games (golf games, minigames, maybe first person shooters though it's close on that one) and far worse then the controller for the kinds of games I like (fighters including smash bros, adventure games, RPGs) where limited buttons and movement based options is more a hinderance then a help.  That's kind of beside teh point though.

   The point is that the DS and other dedicated handhelds are become a waste of time except for very very young (under 8 or 9) children.  

   Mobile phones have had gaming for decades but it was always gaming of last resort, as I said earlier.  They were REALLY bad, very simplistic and since the app marketplace was controlled by the carriers very overpriced.

   Now with the iphone and to a lesser extend Android these games are at least on par with anything on the dedicated devices for between a 75% and 100% discount over similar games on the DS or PSP.   

   In the future I think the choice will be A) make a console/phone or B) switch to making games for a phone platform given how much more powerful mobile phones are getting and how much better the games are getting.

  I really hope that someday, maybe 6 years from now or so, Nintendo chooses B.  I have to think the DS was their peak and when they release future handhelds there will be diminishing returns as more and more people outside the small child market has a phone powerful enough they don't need a handheld.

   I guess in the meantime theres always emulation which works great on the iphone (which I have no legal qualms with since I owned pretty much every game I'd want to play through emulation on the NES or SNES unless the game wasn't released in the US like Secret of Mana 2).

I haven't been on the thread in a little while, but I found what I was looking for. I think things like this are what will take over the mobile gaming market, eventually:

I am unsure what the price is on it to buy at stores, but the developer version starts at $199

Eventually, I think something like this is what Nintendo should do, and Sony will do. You get the best of both worlds - money from hardware, and a much bigger market for software. Imagine 1 billion people having the opportunity to buy Mario Bros. 3. How many of them do you think would buy it?

Some good discussion going on in here. Posting so I can come back to this thread later.

@Impulsivity: You know, pretty much every tech device is seriously obsolete when they retire. Gameboy had retired earlier if people had stopped buying it. Put the blame on the people buying it, not the one who answers the demand.
It had the Color revision, though at this point hardware closer what was seen in GBA could have been possible.

Now, it's interesting you mentioned tech becoming good enough being the reason why would the games in phones replace handheld games, when at the same time you point out that the handheld hardware has been low in performance - so low, that the whole time the mobile phone gaming have existed, phones have had the equal performance. And the games have been cheaper too.
The 3DS should be coming out and we don't know what kind of performance will it have. I don't expect it to be high, since portability is more important feature, but this should be more comparable to todays mobile hardware than the DS that already is years old.

Wii doesn't have a harddrive, decades old magnetig drum tech, because it has state-of-the-art NAND flash memory inside. And why would Wii have any other medium than DVD? All its games so far have fit on one DVD.

Look, you can't be whining about a consoles low performance at the same time you whine about another console that had high performance. N64 had likely been different, if Nintendo hadn't misjudged the developers interest in FMV:s. It was designed so that the whole game would be ran with the engine, which is why it supported compression that could fit 1CD full of game data to a cartridge, when the competition could process raw data. With that in mind, there was no reason to have any more space.

I don't see the reasons to buy a Wii to change anywhere with Move, because people are buying the console for the games it has. And there haven't yet been any competing titles shown, atleast that i know of.

Without competition, any company will take the same route Nintendo took with Gameboy, so i'm not quite sure what's the point in it.

Anyway, with the mobile phone platforms, despite them getting continously more powerful, the devs are still forced to make the games for the lowest common nominator to ensure compatibility. That means the games are designed for hardware that is years old anyway. This is one of the reasons why devs have been jumping ship from PC to consoles for a long time.

Why would you wish Nintendo to start making games for phones? When they design their hardware for the software, they are able to provide much better consumer experience.

@mrstickball: What's preventing people from buying SMB3 now? It's available on Virtual Console.

......The hundreds of millions of people that don't own a Wii and never will?

I mean, look at how well NSMB did for the DS. As a software manufacturer, you try (usually) to put your software on sytems that will have the highest user base penetration. That is why I'm saying that putting Mario in the hands of more people would be a very profitable thing for Nintendo.

We'll have to see how this plays out, but I will continue to vouch for Nintendo handhelds to go the way of more feature integrations that we saw with the DS (from merely a games player with the DS Phat to more multimedia features/digital downloads with the DSi).

@mrstickball: But what's stopping them from buying Wiis? If they can't afford it, they likely aren't going to buy expensive phones either.

I do get where you're coming from, but the idea here is to have as much exclusive content that people would buy as possible on your system.

I believe you agree that it would be much better for Apple to introduce iTunes to as many platforms as possible.

Electronic devices are becoming more feature rich and gaming devibes , but i would say 3DS will be released only with features that are used in games.

^You do realize that Nintendo has a higher profit per employee than Apple, in fact higher than pretty much any company around

Avinash - Why are you throwing around useless numbers? Does it matter if Nintendo makes more money per employee when Apple likely makes more money on their handheld division than Nintendo?