The Wii U Gamepad screen looks just fine to me, so I'd be satisfied with 480p personally.

It should be 720p but honestly i'm not sure. This is Nintendo after all. It'd be a crime if it had a lower resolution than the vita (540p)

My money's on 540p I guess.

I would hope so, I hope that we can finally let the SD era be behind us, on everything.

I'm hoping for 720p and it doesn't seem like such a problem with today's screen technology, but it won't exactly be a dealbreaker if it was 540p or even 480p. The WiiU Gamepad's screen resolution is fine, though it does have a weird problem with the color red. Everything that's red looks terribly pixelated.

Yes, but nothing crazy.

1280x720 should be cheap and look good on a small form factor (6.5 inches or smaller).

I have an 8-inch Samsung 1280x720 LCD tablet that I got for $180, and the screen is light years better looking than the 3DS or Wii U tablet. Like waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay better looking and this is a bargain basement tablet that's more than a year old. 

The next handheld if they go the Fusion route is basically the beginning of a new hardware legacy really too. It's not the GB-GBA-DS-3DS line anymore, it will likely have to be the first Nintendo handheld that can handle the "big boy" games, meaning the real 3D Mario, 3D Zelda, 3D Metroid sequels and everything else Nintendo's designers want to do. 

So design priorities will have to change. On the plus side for Nintendo a lot of this stuff is very mature, cheap technology by now ... yes a 1280x720 LCD display 7 ars ago would've been cutting edge, but today it's very, very cheap and heavily mass produced. 

I think two screens and 3D is out too. Maybe they'll have a way where you can hold the system vertically and buy a controller cradle for 3DS/DS backwards compatibility mode though. 

I really dont think so, no. Will be probably 480p or at most their own vairant of HD which is still below standard 720p, its not like the fans are/would be worried about it, and i dont think it ever will.

Still baffles me sometimes how they got to sell a device without its charger in the first place, if they can do that anything else goes

A 480p LCD honestly might be more expensive than a 720p LCD for Nintendo (and maybe even a 1080p display in a couple of years). 

Better does not mean more expensive, there likely are very few vendors these days mass producing SD resolution displays, as such Nintendo might actually have to pay more. So they might actually have to pay more to get a display of such low resolution, lol. 

I believe MS had a similar problem with regard the original XBox ... 8GB HDDs actually became more expensive than larger capacity HDDs, because no one was making 8GB HDDs anymore, but MS was stuck with 8GB because they wanted to keep the standard spec (either that or I think they may have made a bad deal with a product vendor ensuring the same part for the life time of the XBox). 

So it was actually costing them more to put a smaller 8GB HDD into the XBox than a 16GB or 32GB one would've as that generation went on, lol. Not surprisingly the XBox 360 had a removable HDD that could be upgraded. 

I think they will release a handheld with the same resolution as the PSVita, I don't think they'll make the jump to 720P next gen. The games will still look pretty good though due to the high PPI.

I think people will be surprised at how powerful the next Nintendo handheld is. That's just a guess, but the next Nintendo handheld is not really part of the GB-GBA-DS-3DS family IMO.

It's a new family bloodline -- the Fusion line.

The Fusion concept doesn't work if the Fusion handheld can't run the "big boy" games. That means it had to run Mario Galaxy 3. Not Mario Mini-Galaxy Land. Not Zelda w/Retro 2D Graphics. It has to be able to run the real deal 3D Zelda. It has to run the same versions of Mario Kart and Smash Bros. that the console variant has, not watered down/scaled down versions.

Sure the resolution can be lower, some effects can be turned down, AA/texture filtering can be scaled back, but the entire purpose of a Fusion concept is defeated the moment your dev teams have to make two totally different versions of a 3D Mario because the handheld simply can't run any reasonable port of the home version. 

See my Tegra Nvidia X1 chip thread ... mobile tech is getting to some pretty amazing places.

Nvidia is releasing a home microconsole in May that has a processor more powerful than the Wii U, that eats less energy than a Wii U (comparable to an iPad), has more RAM than a Wii U and is sold at $200, at a hefty profit at that.

Times they are a changing folkes. Mobile tech is very, very different than it was even 6 years ago when Nintendo was finalizing the 3DS hardware.

I think we will see a similar situation as 3DS vs PSP, meaning Nintendo's next handheld will be moderately more powerful than Vita but with a slightly lower resolution. 854x480 is what I'm expecting.

I also think Nintendo might start doing more mid-gen upgrades like New 3DS. Every 2-2.5 years or so Nintendo might make a slight increase to specs and increase screen resolution but by having the same architecture/operating system, all games will still be playable on each iteration.

Spring 2016-handheld launch, 5 inch/480p screen, 2gb RAM

Holiday 2016-TV version launch, 1080p, 4gb RAM

Summer 2017-handheld XL-6" screen, Mini-4" screen

Holiday 2018-upgrade, 720p screen, 3gb RAM, faster CPU

Holiday 2019-TV version upgrade, 4k resolution, 8gb RAM

Holiday 2020-upgrade, 1080p screen, 4gb RAM, faster CPU

Something like this could potentially happen.

The thing is though, to produce a portable that spits out Wii U grade graphics or better, at 720p, would require Nintendo to invest in high end hardware for the first time in, what, 15 years? It's just hard to see them going all out when they haven't for two generations. And there's also battery life to consider, and Nintendo's penchant for making things needlessly expensive with non-standard parts.