I understand what you’re saying, yes they CAN do all these things but that sure doesn’t mean they will. They’re just releasing the 3DS which is $250, do you really think they’re going to release a home console for $99?

I’d love for you to be right, but I can’t be that optimistic.

That is history, before the ARM Processors now are powerful enough to not only run the next gen home consoles, but also to emulate all the previous consoles. It would thus let Nintendo sell a cheaper device to keep largest market share and would easily allow them to add features that can let them disrupt all the other markets of Set-top-boxes, Blu-ray players, Media streamers, Video-conferencing, all those things, Nintendo can include them for free in a $99 next gen console, on top of that, add all their next gen virtual reality gaming sensors and controllers, Nintendo can make lots of money on accessories and content, now they should distribute content directly to gamers.

Some analysts have been spewing doom scenarios for Nintendo vs Apple and the other Smartphone makers, with an ARM Powered next gen home console, Nintendo could fight back all that supposed competition in one swoop and set the bar all that much higher. If they make it the best Youtube HD set-top-box, 100 million people might buy it for $99 just for that, then also have a Blu-ray player in one, and that would be 100 million more potential customers for Nintendo to sell $1 game downloads on-demand to. And Nintendo has about 5000 games that are at least as fun as Angry Birds and have at least the level of graphics as in Angry Birds.

Nintendo is a gaming company, they (historically) don’t try to build all-purpose machines like you want. Instead of doing lots of things in a mediocre fashion, they like to do a few things really well.

I don’t think Nintendo is interesting in making a HD set-top box and competing with Sony in that area. So far they have shown no interest in making their consoles play DVDs or anything like that (with one exception: Netflix). I don’t think a Cortex A9 would be powerful enough to emulate a 730MHz PPC smoothly.

If ARM Cortex-A8 can run N64 games in emulators on Android pretty decently, one could imagine that the next generation Quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 can be powerful enough to emulate all games up to Wii, so that would mean the ARM Powered Wii2 could be backwards compatible with all previous Nintendo games..

Why I think Nintendo should embrace Android and Google TV, is to provide all of those other features one can expect of a HD Set-top-box, I don’t think Nintendo wants to reproduce all those features, including also web browsing, apps marketplace, web tv and more.

They’ll have to merge their games platform over onto Android, like the Sony Playstation Suite, they can’t give up on making billions of dollars on monetizing all of their previous games. Consumers go crazy over a game like Angry Birds, Nintendo has been making games at least as graphically advanced as Angry Birds since SNES in 1992, imagine that Nintendo could instantly unveil 3 dozen Angry Birds type of mega successes, all by simply officially allowing backwards game emulation on the Android platform.