im really interested to see what nintendo are going to do in the handheld space.
they could certainly create an android based device (but with the google stuff removed) and make it as easy as possible to make existing android games work on the new device. just the games have to be bought through the estore instead of the play store. ouya have done something similar.
it could be interesting to use that as the base OS for their next console also.
but its a linux based OS....i dont think nintendo are keen in contributing back code to open source projects. (though a completely open handheld from nintendo could be an interesting proposition...as long as nintendo can still find a way to make it pay for them).
nintendo would be incapable of creating a new OS with the features and robustness of something like android/IOS/windows or Orbis OS (The PS4s OS, based on BSD) from scratch. not even sony can do it from scratch and they are far bigger and have far more experience in the area and MS dont write new OSs from scratch with each new xbox. also making a new OS would mean netflix, facebook and so on would need to make new apps and maintain those apps over the life of the console (which currently barely happens on nintendo platforms.).
so if they were to make such a device that could have the features of android/IOS they would need to start from an existing base and learn it well. BSD would be the most suitable for them since the BSD license does not require code to be contributed back. but BSD is just a kernel....the rest of the stack would still need to be developed. android would give them more of a leg up i think but, as i say, it would require contributions back to android.
i have no idea what they are going to do.
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