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Soundwave on 10 September 2015
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Miyamotoo said:
Soundwave said:


It would be fine ... as long as your hardware is only consuming 2-3 watts max. 

Which means graphics better than the Vita, but considerably below the Wii U/XBox 360. 

You'd get a processor similar to the Apple A8 (the vanilla one, not the A8X) which can pump out about 115 GFLOPS and battery life of about 3 hours. 

3000 MaH is nothing special. 

What Apple has been able to do with their phones through the software/hardware integration is bring down the power usage of tasks like web browsing, video viewing, and other general smartphone usage so they use very little electricity. But that doesn't work in the same way for intensive 3D video games, the iPhone still rips through battery when forced to play higher end games. 

I personally would ditch the 3DS form factor if neccessary and go with a more tablet style form factor. The battery and the resulting chipset you could put inside would be far superior providing a better experience all around. 

Frankly, Vita graphics are so much better than 3DS (I finding that even PSP graphics look better) that only Vita graphics for next Nintendo handheld would be huge improvement (probably biggest improvement for any Nintendo handheld), but maybe we can expect even better graphics with 720p screen.

Vita have 5" display with 2200mAh battery that holds around 4 hours.

And that's fine, but then the problem is where is your console in all this? 

If the handheld is 115 GFLOPS, lets say, you can't have a console that's like 1.5 TFLOP (15 times more powerful) and expect any kind of real meaningful integration, anymore than the Vita is able run even PS3 ports (it can't). 

That probably means a very low end console, which I don't see working out too well for Nintendo, especially with the AppleTV now coming with free-$10 games and a $149.99 sticker price itself. 

I think Nintendo is also keen on at least having Wii U level visuals on their handheld too so they can port games and quickly bring over existing engines to the portable so that can lead to quicker development times. 

The 3DS form factor isn't even that great to be honest, it's not like it's very pocketable at all. If push comes to shove I would let go of that form factor for the time being (a die shrink to 10nm in the future could open the door to it coming back as a pocket model) and embrace a more tablet like form factor.