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Nipping out for a Wii mobile?; may be some time...

 "More powerful, not till 2011." That pretty much sums up all we know about Nintendo's new arm-waving toy, which the company has been describing to developers, apparently.

It's hard to avoid the impression that the only real change is "more pixels" from what little has been leaked through "John's" article yesteday. 

While our sources are reluctant to be too specific about "Wii HD," they have been able to divulge some (albeit predictable) generalizations. High definition visuals are assured, as is a greater emphasis on digitally distributed and backwardly compatible content, indicating that the new system will feature some form of local storage medium such as a hard drive or large flash memory solution. It has also been indicated that Nintendo’s emphasis is again on what the consumer will hold in their hands and interact with, rather than the “console” itself.

But while the report says that "something is going on" it may have missed a trick in studying the hardware.

Wii consoles are (the report points out) based on hardware from a joint AMD-IBM project. However, the trend with hardware is rapidly turning to look at issues other than raw speed. Instead, power consumption and battery life is coming into focus.

Yesterday, IBM (and Samsung) announced what sounds like a very similar joint venture with ARM Holdings - the designers of the low-power microprocessor family that powers almost all mobile phones. The announcement was terse: 

Samsung and ARM today announced they will develop a comprehensive 32 nanometer (nm) and 28nm Systems-on-a-Chip (SoCs) design platform based on high-k metal-gate (HKMG) technology from the IBM-led joint-development alliance.

Under this multi-year collaboration, ARM will develop and license a design platform of physical intellectual property (IP) including logic, memory and interface products for the Common Platform technology alliance of IBM, Chartered and Samsung for distribution to their customers.

There's no suggestion in the IBM-ARM announcement that any of this will be focused on games players. However, it would be astonishing if their project didn't produce ideas for high-performance mobile games devices. And it would be equally astonishing if the Wii didn't produce mobile spin-offs.

None of this, however, is expected to be announced at today's Nintendo press launch - which is supposed to be revealing "coloured" Wii consoles (whoopee!) and, perhaps, the Nintendo "storage solution."