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Soundwave on 09 September 2015
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Miyamotoo said:
Soundwave said:


The other problem you run into with a 3DS XL sized handheld is there's only a certain amount of power you can put in there realistically and actually fit a battery inside that could power it for more than 2 hours. 

So if that's part 1 of your "unified ecosystem" and like every other Nintendo handheld, this is the SKU that sells the most ... you kind of have a problem with the console. 

A 300 GFLOP portable and a 2 TFLOP console or something like that the gap is too ridiculous that it negates a lot of the points of a unifed platform because the gap is simply far too large to allow for easy porting in quite a few cases. 

Battery capacity and hardware architecture are much improved from period when 3DS was project and introduced. 3DS XL has battery 1700 mAh and pretty weak hardware specs, today phones have battery capacity 3000-4000 mAh, 5-6" displays with 1440p resolution, 4GB Ram, 8-core CPUs and suitable GPU and yet battery can survive at least 5 hours of constant using.

I dont see problem if handheld continue to sell better like it was always, that wasn't problem previous gens for Nintendo.

In case of devices (handheld and home console) I did not mentioned any specs but I dont see problem there either because they will use exactly same architecture, I don't think it would so much difference in power between handheld and home console, with handheld Nintendo will probably aim for 480-720p resolution and with home console probably 1080p with better textures and effects.


I've kinda thought about this, the thing is batteries are not particularily expensive. For example the battery in an iPhone 6 Plus costs Apple like $5.50. So that's no the issue per se. 

The issue is more about size. The battery is huge once you start getting into power consumption at a sustained 4-5 watts/hour for gamplay. The iPhone 6 Plus for example has 11.1 watts per hour in that 2915 mAh battery. That means at a 4-5 watt push from a gaming handheld, the battery would be dead in about 2 hours. 

You need a battery more akin to what's in the iPad and other tablets (much larger). The fourth gen iPad for example had an insane 43 watts per hour battery (I suspect the new iPad Pro is about the same or even bigger). 

Not to mention the heat being generated. 

For the portable Nintendo may honestly be better off going with a more tablet like form factor (like the iPad mini) and then waiting for a die shrink to 10nm for a more classic GBA SP/DS styled handheld as the years go on.