Lots of posts all over the place hit this weekend claiming that Nintendo was poised to announce and release a new DS. The stories trace back to the Land of the Rising Fun, specifically newspaper articles like this one from Yomiuri Online or this one from Nikkei.
The reports claim the DS will have some sort of built-in camera functionality and music playback and that it will be hitting stores sometime this year.
Nintendo has issued "no comments" and "we have not made any announcements" to the media both here and in Japan. Here's what the fine folks over at Music Television heard:
“The Nikkei newspaper wrote a recent story about a DS solely based upon their own research and speculation, without interviewing Nintendo. While Nintendo is always working on new hardware, we have not made any announcement about a DS and we cannot comment on the Nikkei story.”
I can't imagine an interview with Nintendo would have turned up anything fruitful. I mean, waltzing in and asking "hey, are you guys releasing a new DS this year or what?" doesn't get you very far. But I also can't imagine these reports would be totally baseless--these are well-respected outlets we're talking about here, not blurry scans from 2ch or whatever.. When you consider that Nintendo is giving presentations to the press in Japan and here in the US this week, it all starts to add up.
So if this new DS thing is going to happen, I expect we'll all know about it within the next 7-10 days. What do you think? Do you think it's time for new DS hardware, and is stuff like a camera and music support enough to get you to buy (or rebuy) Nintendo's popular handheld? What would you add? As you might expect, that's our current question of the moment! Go answer it!