Nintendo DS + Palm.

personally this would be awesome if it were to actually happen. i would buy it immediately.



it makes perfect sense. the DS easily has all the capabilities of a decent Palm OS device already... a touchscreen... decent resolution on both screens... 2 cartridge slot that could easily take a cartridge adapter for SD media... built-in WiFi... dual processors... microphone and speakers/headphone jack (VoIP anyone?)... it would actually make a really good Palm device compared to some of Palms current offerings!

i don't know how it would work though... cartridges loaded into the bottom (Gameboy Advance) slot can't access both screens was my understanding. and only the bottom slot would be big enough to hold an SD card within the cartridge. so that would be a dual-cartridge solution... not the end of the world... but might be a pain to have to physically load 2 separate cartridges to have the Palm stuff running. DS slot holding the actual application... GBA slot holding an SD card adapter. though i suppose the DS cartridge could simply include a small amount of flash memory on it. say 32MB or so.

i imagine all the syncing could easily be done via WiFi as the Tungsten C (and presumably WiFi-card equipped T5 and Zire 72) supposedly has the capability already.

considering there are Gameboy and NES and other emulators already out for Palm OS ... i can see Nintendo enforcing it's recently granted patent a little more stringently in regard to Palm OS emulators... should they themselves become a Palm licensee. as in ...

Last year, Nintendo was granted a patent on emulating any type of gaming platform with software. It has used this to try to stop companies, most notably Crimson Fire, from making applications that allows handhelds to play Gameboy games of various types.

that's from a Brighthand article concerning the Palm OS powered Tapwave portable gaming system. personally i don't quite understand how Nintendo was even granted such a far-reaching patent... especially when they themselves have little to do with actual emulation software. seems like the patent itself basically just acts as protection against emulators. which seems counter-productive to the actual patent process. oh well.

also ... all this rumor seems to be related to the recent "V-Pocket" name that Nintendo got... personally i think "V-Pocket" is just the North American name for the "Play-Yan" video adapter cartridge they already have in Japan. "Play-Yan" makes no sense as a name in North America... "V-Pocket" however makes perfect sense as a name for a cartridge that lets you play video.

more reads on the whole DS + Palm rumors :

Slashdot

Engadget

z.