Nintendo DS Successor By End of Year?

With Nintendo DS sales slowing in Japan, could Nintendo have a successor waiting in the wings? Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter think so, telling investors in a note that Nintendo “has a new handheld device ready for launch in [Japan] before the end of the calendar year”, according to a report from Edge Online.

In fact, it’s those cooling hardware sales on the DS that may force Nintendo to react, making an end-of-year announcement more likely, Pachter writes. The DS has been regularly outsold by the PSP for the past few months in Japan, with marquee software releases doing little to boost matching hardware sales.