And compared to its competition, the DS.

Your expectations are awfully high. At least with appearance (and not raw power) I have some confidence that Nintendo's next handheld could deliver aesthetics in the range of the 360, but that will entirely be in the eye of the beholder.

I must ask what you mean by "a promotional platform for indie devs."

Really I mean visible effort from nintendo side of things. A place for indie dev titles to highlighted online similar to the playstation blog, the playstation endorsed trailers on their youtube channel and getting acknowledged in press conferences or Nintendo directs.

They do this all the time. They also feature indie games very prominently on their digital storefront, right alongside major first-party releases. Nintendo doesn't have a blog or anything, but they have short programs like the Nintendo Minute on their Youtube channel where they frequently give the spotlight to indie devs.

In a way... Actually their next handheld has already been introduced as the xperia z3. It is clear they are thinking of remote play as the future of dedicated handheld gaming if you look at the vita. You phone will be the psp 3

I think they would
1)Sony is engineer-driven company, there is a huge demand within it to make new hardware.
2)As mobile devices reach saturation point and Google drives prices down, there will be more breathing space for specialized devices in the future.
3)Raw power will be there to allow easy porting of big PS3 exclusive library.

Ok cool. Maybe my perception is drawn from the lack of indie titles in comparison to the vita, which maybe just goes back to the whole Unity thing.

No. They dropped the ball too hard with the Vita. There is no recovering from that.

Third parties have saved the Vita, but Sony dropped it quick and hard. They lost consumer confidence for portables. No matter how good a system and games they came up with, it would end like the Dreamcast.

No. They should focus on not to waste any more money on new consoles that are a risk and will make them bleed more money than they are now.

I think it's finally a good time to introduce Xperia Play 2. Specs/price is what killed the first one, now with streaming in place, specs are a non issue, just a good screen to keep it affordable.

People are used to huge ass screens, add a slider gamepad and except for always troublesome R2/L2 mapping, it would be a way better portable solution than pairing an Xperia device with a Dualshock 4.