There's a lot of problem that come from buying a big studio.

I think they would be smarter to go the way Sony has been going for the past 10 years and purchase small studios, it's easier to shift the momentum of those, there is less risk involved in each aquisition and you don't have to handle the headache of multiplatforms games suddenly becoming exclusives....

Clearly even if it was possible, buying something like Activision would not be a good match for Nintendo ( and Activision is not for sale, over 50% of the capital is held by Vivendi , a french conglomerate) and most likely would destroy value, not create it...

we will see as time goes on

I don't think we can tell for sure how well/bad the 3DS will do because, as of now, it sucks as a gaming platform. There's almost no reason to buy one right now. We'll see how it does when it gets some games.

Those who say Nintendo should release its IP on a platform that isn't their own, PARTICULARLY in an arena they are competing in, need to look at one company and see the net results of that: Sega.

Back in the day, when Sega was bailing out of the console market, and in the console war period of that day, you had individuals in the Sony camp CHEERING how they could now finally get Sega's stuff.  What happened next to Sega, as I predicted that time?  They became a marginal player.  When you don't have your own platform, you just aren't important.  No site, or videogame magazine, will give you your own section.  Anyone see Sega as a section on this website?  Heck, anyone see Atari on here? Atari is even more irrelevant than Sega at this point.

As Nintendo has stated over and over and over, when discussing things, they design their platforms to meet what their designers want to do.  Take that way from them, and they don't have the control they seek.  

So, end result is no here.  By the way, Nintendo DID let their IP go on another platform in the past.  Mario and Link ended up on another platform.  And I don't mean the PC game title either, although that is one.  I mean another one.   And those who know what that is, can know why I say what I am saying now.

What other console?

Yep I don't see tablets as competing with portables either.

Smartphones on the other hand.........

The issue for portable is do you continue trying to build your own portable machines of which at best you will send 100 million if it is very successfull or do you tap the increasingly growing smartphone market which is already much bigger than the portable market and probably will be a 500 million phones market in a few years...

The only issue there is that noone has yet demonstrated how successfull one can be selling apps for lets say 20-30$ instead of the current 1$ price point....

If you can successfully sell a rich gaming app for lets say 20$ , then inevitably the portable market will die as it just can not compete with the size of the smart phone market....

I mean selling 20 million Nintendogs at 50$ or selling 100 millions at 20$ ? The choice isn't hard......

Thing is that people buy a smart phone or tablet, for other reasons, and the games go along with it.  This is similar to what you have in regards to owning a computer.  For someone who isn't a core gamer, they will end up being happy with Angry Birds.  Games are a pleasant distraction to help wind down, kill some time, and so on.  People get tablets as a luggable device to access documents, and the Internet, rather than use a computer.  For myself, I will be looking into getting an Android tablet later this year, because I need to bring rules for games I created with me, and not printing out pages and pages of PDFs to lug around.  End result of my need for this, it makes me ponder getting a 3DS or even a Vita.  Getting those would be in addition to what I need for more pressing matters.  And if resources are limited for me, it comes to practical need over core gaming want.

I am not going to say.  Let's just say the Link (Zelda) title in particular is so legendarily bad, that people who know of it, intentionally forget that it exists, and pretend it never came out.  

Ok, you REALLY do want a hit?  Look up Hotel Mario.

Was it a Sega console? Atari?

The one issue portable maker will be facing for sure in the future by the way is the fact it is going to be harder and harder to sell the portable machine at a profit when competing with a smart phone market where technology and price will evolve a lot faster due to the high volume and the fierce competition between phone makers.......

And yeah I don't necessary think that all of Nintendo's game would be well suited for smart-phones, but something like Nintendogs or Pokemon ?