How does it make the programming easier and faster? If I programmed a game and ran it at 480p on one platform and 720p on another, the cost of development doesn't change. In fact, we see this on open-platforms like Android, and IOS all the time. The games run at the resolution native to your screen (in fact you need third party apps to make them run less if you want.)  In fact, in many cases a higher resolution might LOWER development costs, because you don't have to think of ways to make up for low image quality, such as say text-scaling or showing a feature in a game that would otherwise be obscured by the low image quality.  The only thing a higher resolution output would affect is what GPU you need to put into the console to run the visuals you want to run at said resolution. That is a hardware cost, not a software one. The reason why development costs increased is that games became more complex to produce and software technique had to be discovered. This has only so much to do with resolution in as much that resolution was a burden before and limited how complex games could be and now it is large enough that it isn't. 

um, no. The next handheld should have about the same power as ps360, meaning it will be quite bellow wii u.

sorry i should say Nintendo handheld always comes with low resolution not just because of hardware cost but also software development cost, this is how they earn their profits more than Sony... 

I expect the next handheld to have the same advantages over the PS360 that the WIi U has, more and faster ram, modern GPU features, etc. Maybe it won't have the raw performance advantage that the Wii U has, but those things are cheap advancements that are almost guaranteed over the PS360. 

Depends on the game ... my little Samsung tablet that's a bargain basement piece of sub $200 piece of tech can run games at 720p just fine. It won't run Far Cry 3 at 720p obviously but Sim City or Clash of Clans? Sure. Even a dated iPhone 5s chip, something Nintendo could have for peanuts could drive a 720p display with graphics considerably better than the Vita. 

Just because you have a 720p display doesn't mean every game has to run at 720p. I'm going to guess most people here have a 1080p TV ... well they've been playing sub-1080p games on their TVs for ages (shudders at the Wii era). When you play a Virtual Console game on 3DS from your DS you're running games at a lower resolution than the native screen. Ditto for GBA/SNES games on the Wii U tablet that look just fine. 

The 3D display on the 3DS is what's a huge battery/performance hog. Remove that and you can get a cheaper HD screen that's easy on battery life. No one cares about 3D these day anyways (you might want to write an actual story for Avatar 2, Mr. Cameron), and for those who do there's always a possibility to release a 3D version later (why not, Nintendo releases 3-4 different revisions of each handheld anyway, might as well have one that's tangiably different).