We've all heard the rumors about Café having built in portable functionality in its controllers, and we've all wondered what this might mean. It would seem odd for Nintendo to try and have Café compete with the 3DS after all.

But as Japan is becoming increasingly focused on handhelds, maybe Nintendo is trying to offer limited handheld functionality with Café in order to draw people back to home consoles? They would be betting on those who really want handhelds still getting them (for the 3DS), but those who aren't so much after handheld gaming would choose Café instead. This could be people who play their handhelds at home a lot for example.

It was just a thought that struck me, and I have no idea if there is any basis for it. But hopefully we'll know soon enough.

I don't believe Café will really be portable. The controller may be able to stream video from the console, say, within Wi-Fi range. Anything more than that will require a lot of processing power on the controller, making it a full-fledged portable gaming system which wouldn't be cheap.

Nope.

In japanise train it looks like this - there's full car of people doing something on their phone, few guys playing psp or doing something on tablet , once every few trains you meet guy with DS.

So what would cafe have that smartphones don't ?

And I agree. But it might be Nintendo's way of going after those who play their handhelds a lot at home for example.

The Café could have a bunch of small games, where it could easily play several of them at once, and stream each game to the respective player.

Yes I absolutely agree with that. It would also be the first console you can play while taking a shit.

As for playing multiple games on different controllers, that would be really cool. It might happen but then those games would have to be specifically made with the limited shared hardware in mind. Maybe for some downloadable games.

Exactly. And games like Brain Age fit very well with that concept and maybe emulation of old titles would work too.

Read what NJ5 and I discussed.

No, absolutely not... it makes no sense. They already have something for the handheld market, and creating competition for yourself is stupid. What will something like that be able to do that other devices can't?

If you want a home console and your kids each want their own handhelds, then buying a home console that includes enough handheld functionality to satisfy your kids seems like a smart thing to do. And buying an extra "handheld" for the Café will be much cheaper than buying a new 3DS.

This is still very loose of course, but since we don't really know anything about Café, it's what we have to go on. There might be a market for this and there might not. I don't know.

Loose indeed ;) but the wait is now almost inexistent.

This E3 is gonna be enormous.