Of they could be the trolls. That's the thing with sat-on patents. Immersion at least used their haptics system.

 That's just a model. That has nothing to do with actual future plans.

 Plus if they did take out the touch screen, the DS would be a saftey net, the way the GBA was the safety net for the DS.

In practically every way flash memory is far superior to optical mediums; flash memory is smaller in size, faster, more durable, and uses far less power. The only benefit optical mediums have is they have a far large capacity ...

Even the capacity advantage is rapidly disapearing because in 1996 DVD and Nintendo's N64 cartridge were both cutting edge formats and the capacity difference was about 100 to 1; today the difference between flash and Blu-Ray/HD-DVD is roughly 10 to 1; and in 5 years optical mediums will probably only have a 4 to 1 advantage over flash memory. Basically, optical capacity increases at a rate of approximately 10 times every 10 years while memory capacity doubles every 24 months (or 32 times every 10 years).

Hmmm, a tilt sensitive controller.

A medialess device would allow something very small/thin with long battery life. Removing all the mechanisms would also reduce breakdowns. Solid state is best when it comes to portables.

 The N64 carts didn't use flash memory. They were just expensive chips to hold the games. That was a lot of the problem.

Depending on what formats appear in 5 years, thats a possibility. HVD shows prospects of reaching about 4TB, and BRD should be able to hit around 200GB.

 As for speed, a 300x flash drive is roughly eqivalent to a 1x speed Blu Ray drive. Hardly the speed demon. It will get faster with maturation, but in terms of speed, and capacity, optical media will outpace it for years to come.

Of course none of that matters for a portable.

I'll take it you realise your statement is completely incorrect ;)

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Lets look at some of the advantages of the DS vrs PSP:

1/ Battery life: Memory access is much more power friendly than a disc-based device

2/ Loading times: Memory has no access/seek time - games will load a lot faster from RAM/ROM than from disc

3/ Manufacture cost: No disc drive is a significant cost saving, not to mention associated shell space & design

4/ DS - lighter/smaller: The disc mechanism is not only "large", its "heavy". Carts are tiny, and the slot weighs nothing.

5/ Game swapping time: Its much easier/faster to flick a DS cart in/out of the slot, than it is to switch PSP games.

6/ Save game support: Its easy to put save memory (EEPROM) on a cart, and impossible on a disk. This makes it very easy for a cart based game to manage its own saves - where a disc based device either needs to save to a general "save card", or non-erasable memory on the device itself. Its harder to program/support saving to a save-card (handle formatting, removal of existing saves, no memory, etc...).

7/ Required RAM (cost, battery use): The DS needs a lot less RAM than a PSP does. The entire data set on a cart is always available (and fast), whereas a PSP needs to load/cache data from the disc into memory - then access it. Extra RAM is basically needed as a cache for data on the disc.

8/ Development ease: Following on from above, this makes it harder to program/optimise a disc-based device. You might need to write background loaders, spin the disc up early, worry about extra battery drain, end up with games "pausing" during a game (while data loads), etc. Disc drives can also deteriorate during the lifetime of a device, effectively killing the hardware. This variable seek time can make it very hard to develop disc based games that stream a lot of data. The DS effectively has unlimited music/sfx/texture space/memory - as it can address all this data instantly. The only concern is with pure optimisation, where data that needs to be accessed more quickly - should be placed in faster memory (with a lower read wait state/time).

9/ Piracy: Its generally a lot harder to pirate cartridge based devices than disc based devices (several reasons). 

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The advantages that a disc based mechanism is simple - virtually unlimited amounts of (ROM) data - for free. Now that carts are large enough (1Gbit - or larger??), and they are also very cheap to manufacture in large quantities - close to disc pressing costs - the extra data is the only advantage.

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It may not be obvious, but there are very good reasons for using cart-based memory in a handheld device ;)

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NOTE - its interesting to look at a console based device.

Advantages #1, #4, #5 no longer apply. They tend to have a lot more RAM, so #7 doesn't apply as much either.

Advantages #2, #3, #6, #8, #9 still very much apply - with #8 & #3 being very important.

Once the next generation of carts hit, there is no reason for any device to use disc-based media (except possibly for backwards compatibility).

I wouldn't be completely shocked if the Wii II went back to cart-based media - it would be just the type of unexpected move that Nintendo could make ;)

Where do you get this from?

Just checkec Wikipedia:

BluRay - 36Mbit/sec (4.5 MB/sec)

Flash drives/USB keys:

    Old - 1MB/sec

    New/current - 10-30MB/sec

    Future (spec'd) - 60MB/sec

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???

No question that optical discs are the way to go re: huge storage space. But they generally suck in terms of read/write speed.