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Nintendo's reportedly using Android for their next console

By Salehuddin Bin Husin - on 2 Jun 2015, 1:56pm

Nintendo's reportedly using Android for their next console

From the Game and Watch to the Wii, in one picture. Only the Wii U and the New 3DS are missing.

Nintendo's already working on their next console. We've known that for awhile now, ever since the company announced that they are making mobile games to complement their console and portable titles.

Called the NX, the console is to be the successor to the Wii U, which launched on November 18, 2012 in the US. The console initially did well, capitalizing on the success of the Wii, but faltered when the new generation of consoles from Microsoft and Sony debuted a year later. The Wii U is not only technically inferior to both the Xbox One and the Playstation 4, it also has the least third party support among all the consoles and is dead last in lifetime sales among all three current consoles. Compared to the Wii, the Wii U is sorely under-performing.

It's no wonder then that Nintendo might want to cut their losses and start anew with a more competitive machine. What's surprising is that Nintendo might go the Android route. While it's not the first time a console might adopt a commercial OS (Sega's Dreamcast ran on a version of Windows), it's Nintendo's first. The Dreamcast was a heaven for piracy and hombrew as Sega's security measures aside, the fact that it ran a version of Windows meant it was easily hacked to run everything from homebrew programs to pirated software. One wonders whether that might be the case too for the NX if it does go the Android route.

Piracy concerns notwithstanding, Nintendo seems to be considering using Android as their OS since they want to easily expand development to cover tablets and phones. Porting games over from NX to a mobile device would be much easier if they ran on the same OS, which is in sync with Nintendo wanting to expand their presence in the smart device arena. Again, Sega took the same route with the Dreamcast and their Naomi arcade boards. Not only did it make the porting of games running on Naomi hardware to the Dreamcast easy, it basically guaranteed an 'arcade perfect' port, which meant that the home version was an exact replica of the arcade version at its most basic level.

If Nintendo does the same and standardizes a custom version of Android as its OS going forward, we can not only expect quality ports of console releases on mobile devices, but also faster transition times between a game releasing on the NX and it coming to a smart device. That is of course, if Nintendo is aiming for a staggered release, instead of a simultaneous multi-platform one.

Of course, this does raise some interesting questions about the future of Nintendo portables. The software giant has always been using its own OS for all their hardware, be it console or portable. With a possible Android OS as the backbone for the NX, does it also spell the end for custom in-house OS for Nintendo portables, like the rumored 3DS successor?

Source: Nikkei
Via: Polygon

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