SD Cards could reduce the cost of the system, rather than systems having a disc drive and a HDD, the platform could just use SD Cards, for both a handheld and a console.
Just using SD card readers would reduce the costs of the platform and Nintendo can sell their own branded version.
There are benefits in the form of read and write speeds, flexibility of the sheer size of a card being tiny.
The only issue is in the cost of the actual physical medium. 32GB SD Cards cost like £7.99 at retail, vs like £0.35 for a 25GB Bluray Disc.
Maybe if Nintendo can get the cost per game card down to under a pound then it would be a viable option.
Maybe a supplier can make Nintendo a good deal for their cards. Hopefully this doesn't drive the cost of games up, to cover the cost of the physical game storage.
It'd be nice if Nintendo could release a platform that doesn't have loading times at all and near instant game saves.
Seems like NX is launching this year. I don't see why this couldn't mean both the home console and a handheld will release this Fall (the hardware and software to make a unified platform exists).
Microsoft have done fine by announcing in May 2013 and releasing that November, hell if Nintendo have a clear message, some good launch games, a reasonable price for the systems then they'd be fine just announcing at E3 and hitting everyone in the face with NX.
A home console with an AMD 8 core Puma CPU at 2.4GHz, along with a 2.76Tflop GPU and 8GBs of GDDR5 clocked at 264GB/s would be pretty cheap, like no more than £350 (not bad for a system with 50% more power than PS4).
Handheld with around 1/10th of the performance would be capable of running the same games at 480p, with some reductions in graphical settings (AA, AF, Texture detail, Geometry levels and Particles), but the same core experience is easily doable at £200.
Nintendo could even still go all digital and still sell games through retailers doing the downloading for you and you take an SD Card or Flash Drive to Gamestop, Game or whoever your local retailer is.
