New Nintendo handheld is ready for release this year, predicts analyst

Analyst Michael Pachter has made a bold prediction regarding Nintendo's future plans, saying that he believes the company has a new handheld device ready to launch before the end of the year.

The Wedbush Morgan exec's comments follow Nintendo's financial results yesterday, which - while being far from gloomy with a 34 per cent rise in profits - revealed sales of the DS are in decline in Japan. After all, there are only so many people to sell them to and it seems the DS boom there is over.

As reported by GamesIndustryBiz, DS sales in the US and Europe still remain strong, and Pachter predicts the majority of the DSs shipped during the rest of this fiscal year will go to these territories, while Nintendo will prepare to launch new hardware in Japan.

"It is likely that DS demand will continue to decline in Japan, and we think that Nintendo has a new handheld device ready for launch in that territory before the end of the calendar year," said Pachter.

"We think that the lion's share of the expected 28 million DS hardware units shipped during the fiscal year will land in the US and Europe, and we expect to see strong software sales in those territories."

It has been speculated on before that Nintendo will need to release new hardware once sales of the DS reach their peak, and possibly borrow from the sort of business model used by Apple with the phenomenally successful iPod by releasing constantly updated hardware. The enviable problem with selling so many millions is that eventually demand will wane.

Pachter's predictions make sense. Now we just want to know when Nintendo is planning to whip the dust covers off the DS Lite 2. With E3 being the logical place to do it though, we're guessing we have a couple of months still to wait.