@mrstickball: Your argument about multiplatform development would have much more substance if you'd be pointing out how Apple would be doing the same thing.

Yes, the phones with touchscreen are coming down in price, but i could imagine how crappy a game like NSMB would be to play with it. With the 3DS, Nintendo is likely to take the step forward, leaving others to fight with the touch interface.

iPhone has tons of exclusive content, but that's pretty irrelevant because i was talking about Nintendo making exclusive content to its own platforms. When they crank out software that sells hardware, they make money with the software, hardware and eventually with 3rd party licensing. If they would release software to another platforms, that would be less exclusive content for their own, less profit per software sold and less reasons to buy Nintendos hardware.
Going 3rd party would likely bring bigger short term profit, but smaller in the long term.

I don't think we'll see hybridised (as in putting X in because everybody else is doing it) Nintendo hardware, but features that are designed games in mind (this doesn't mean they couldn't be used in any other purpose though).

Apple is making lots of money with their handhelds, but i would point out that Micro$oft is making much more money with their OS business than Apple, which is showing how much money there is in the business.

How much overlapping there is and there will be between phones and portable consoles markets depends aand will depend a lot on interfaces and the games themselves. In some games or applications genres there is already overlapping, also with tablet and palm PCs and other handheld devices (for example recipe books, console ports of paper games, some edutainment games, etc).

...So why did Nintendo put a camera on the DSi?

...Why did Nintendo add Netflix to the Wii? Or a weather channel?

Nintendo has done things, especially recently, that point to them adding features that have nothing to do with gaming. I could mention probably a dozen other things that the Wii/DS have that have no need for gaming, yet are there (and weren't on the GC or GBA).

Oh, by the way, have you ever tried gaming on a smartphone?

Here's why

That was my first though after unveiling a camera in new DS redesign, the thing is huge in Japan among teenage girls, it's purikura. Nintendo seems have no problem in serving people's needs if they fits their business model and weren't massively served by others (i.e. so called media features). As a result a lot of borderline game\application titles, e.g. WiiFit.

Despite of common belief nothing in DSi is media feature, nothing even suggests it's trying to compete with smartphones except for one improtant thing - DSiWare. Think of it as roadblock preventing smartphones from moving upmarket, or actually giving space for relatively low-end gaming on handhelds, that's an opportunity for 3rd parties such as Gameloft that are successful in mobile gaming to make business on handhelds as well.

So how does Netflix, Weather, and checking flight times in Seattle fit into gaming?

Or about audio recorder on the DSi - What gaming apps is that being used in?

@mrstickball: The camera was used in Wario Ware and Nintendo likely was testing out the camera tech for future applications.

News and forecast channels were good points. All i can say to that is, that they offered high customer value for low cost.
However, i didn't mean adding features later in a consoles life, but what you get at launch.

Yes, i have tried gaming on a smartphone. Bad for your battery life, especially when you have 3G connection running on the background with an instant messenger/IP phone, WLAN network put up from your phone and making phonecalls with it.

@mrstickball: The recorder is cheap software that takes advantage of the mic in DS.

Did I say they suppose to? In any case you should agree that Nintendo adding those non-gaming features either very differently from competitors with little or no marketing or pretty lame since none of those are driving hardware sales, thus irrelevant and aren't worth discussing, unless, of course, you insist that Nintendo hardware pose a threat to competitors with their non-gaming features, do you? =)

On a side note, Miyamoto on Wii Channels:

Originally, the plan was that Wii would be a device that would be placed in the living room, and as such we wanted everyone in the house to be able to use it. And the concept really ties in to Wii Channels: we wanted the Wii to become an additional set of channels for everyone in the family to use, and the only difference is that these channels, which happen to be on your TV, are interactive channels. And as long as those channels are a fun entertainment experience, then everyone in your family can sit down and take advantage of those. So the idea is that the Wii would be a device that you would not necessarily have to sit and play for hours on end, but that you could play for just a little bit of time every day.

//It supposed  to be some kind of lifestyle expirence, I guess. Wii Channels failed at this, but WiiFit and other software titles succeed.

Its not useless, it depicts the flaw in your argument, having a higher profit per employee, shows that Nintendo is actually better off than Apple, not to mention better run.

No threat whatsoever. They're entirely different markets. One could point to the number of game apps for the iPhone, certainly, but how many of these are not essentially clones of the same five basic games: Tetris, Minesweeper, Pole Position, Solitaire, and Sokoban? I am not attempting to call such games shovelware, or belittle the development effort that goes into them, but they split each others' markets up too severely. Measure the number of distinct games -i.e. collapsing all games that could be fairly described as clones of one another, or of a common ancestor, into only one entity- and the numbers are likely to be far lower.