Only if they make a Smart Phone / handheld console hybrid.

There are laptops for gameing...  Why cant there be a gameing phone?

Its not thin, or light, but has a beefy battery.... it can take game cartridges, and its slightly larger than a normal phone do to physical buttons.... but it offers a better gameing experiance that a normal smart phone. Yet its NOT a handheld, it needs to do everything a normal smart phone can (apps and all).

The tricky part is the balanceing act of not going too overboard, or under delivering on certain aspects.

A playstation phone, or Nintendo Phone could be the "future" of handhelds.

With Nintendo it;s likely.

Dunno why you threw in the PC and consoles part though, people still build their own machines or buy them at varying prices and have had great games for years. It's not like PC gaming just got good only a few years ago.

Nintendo is planning on changing the way they handle handhelds. Soooo we'll see.

But for Sony............

As much as I like all my handhelds... I doubt it.

Smartphone gaming will be "good enough" as a pastime for more and more people.
Handheld gaming will never die, but it will further lose significance.

I don´t think so. Neither handhelds nor home consoles.
I don´t see a future for dedicated gaming devices. I do believe that they will merge with smartphones or tablets somehow. The NX may be an indication of that.

sure but it was/is a similar situation.

everybody needs a pc anyway.

everybody needs a smartphone anyway.

if you pay enough money for them, they will be more capable in terms of raw performance then an handheld or console.

So you need both anyway, and both can play games, so the decission is do you want the 2in1 solution or 2 seperate devices.

Even with all advantages pc gaming can offer, home consoles like the ps4 are selling great these times. Mainly because people thinking pcs are to confusing or to expensive and because of the games (exclusives) for sure. It could be similar with handhelds and smartphones in the future.

In a slightly relatable way yes but not all the way. It's like saying my grandma is a PC gamer because she plays 3D pinball on her Dell XP but there are core differences in gaming and PC gaming from average joe office computers.

PS4 is selling like it is due to the competition not doing so stellar and that people out there still want a console, PC still has it's advantages and is still growing  by the day. Those that think PC gaming is confusing need to learn a bit more about it rather than forever scratching their heads. I dunno about handhelds and smartphones, I don't find either confusing but I do know that a lot of the fancier smartphones are expensive, especially when you factor in pay as you go and then contract billing which is you essentially paying every month till the day you stop the contract as opposed to paying one payment for a handheld and playing games from there on.

I dont think it will comeback like it was in the past. I guess it can be a big niche (50 Million) for nintendo but thats it.

If they have no new ideas sooner or later Nintendo will migrate to Android-Iphone.

There will always be a market for it, but it'll never be as large as it once was (7th gen with over 250m units on handheld alone...).

It depends. In it's current form, no I do not think there is a long-term market for handhelds like the PSV and the 3DS. That said, I do believe that there is still a market for portable games that use physical buttons as well as the more immersive gaming experience that you can only find on dedicated handhelds in comparison to smartphones.

I think the handheld gaming console needs to be reinvented. People don't want to be carrying around a big clunky handheld when they already have a smartphone that takes up most of their pocket space and comes with its own, much faster graphics processing capabilities. My hope is that future handhelds can come in a much smaller form factor and ideally even utilize the processing capabilities of the smartphone that everybody carries through wireless to justify its existence alongside smartphones.

One thing the smartphone will never be is a hardcore gaming device. Even if they find a way to address the lack of physical buttons, it's just not a platform where you're going to get an immersive gaming experience... there are just too many distractions on a smartphone (it's like trying to play hardcore games on Facebook). I think that as long as there are hardcore gamers there will be a market for hardcore gaming handhelds: I just think that companies like Nintendo need to adapt the concept of the dedicated handheld to work alongside smartphones, not against them.