DeNa said Nintendo is the second biggest shareholder of the company now after the owner who has 15%.

Well if they do it'll probably be a few generations back in terms of features and functionality.

OT: I doubt it. Getting into the smartphone business requires a lot of money & patents. I don't think Nintendo wants to take that big of a risk if just releasing content on existing smartphone ecosystems works well enough.

That was exactly my argument against Nintendo doing this.  The counter argument I received was that Nintendo's hardware isn't doing very well, but I think that only supports my point.

Mind providing a link? Last I heard, Sony sold their shares of DeNA...

Sony used to own 13% but they sold it off a year or so ago.

OT: Why would Nintendo even consider going up against the experience of Samsung and Apple and attempt to break into the smartphone market? Even Sony, who is a much, much bigger company, with a much broader portfolio, is losing that fight badly, despite having really great hardware.

They would need to ensure the device is affordable so they would likely be aiming at the lower end of the Android market, competing against the up and coming (huge) Chinese manufacturers and again, to what end? They would have the additional overhead of R+D of another new device that would require more frequent hardware refreshes than Nintendo are accustomed to, developing and maintaining an OS skin (no point just using stock Android) in line with Android updates, all the additional overhead of negotiating and managing telco deals/data plans and all the other bells and whistles that come with marketing and supporting smartphones.....all in an industiry where they have no experience.

All for the purposes of making, maybe, a small profit on the hardware and broadening the market they sell games to?  They will already be doing that by releasing to the App Store and Google Play and won't be limiting their audience to a particular hardware platform.

I honestly can't see what benefit there would be in it for them.

It's too hard to compete with iPhone. To make and release a smartphone with that kind of quality and power, they'd have to sell the damn thing for $700.00 dollars lol. The only way it would work is if they become second party with Apple imo. Android is out of the picture because they're too fragmented.

Well, in the same principle that Nintendo is in the console market where they obviously do not directly compete with Sony or Microsoft. They may be able to take advantage of a middle-end platform with Nintendo IPs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYCDDVSq_2o

No, its way to saturated already. Breaking Apple and Samsung's dominance is like expecting someone to save you when your falling from a bridge and no ones around. Even Sony and Microsoft, two companies many times larger than Nintendo have struggled to push into the market well. If Nintendo actually came, they'd be in and out within a week.

No, unless they really needed to, but I don't see their being a "Nintendo Smartphone" anytime soon.