As the mobile division at Nintendo continues to bring more of its major franchises to phones and tablets, some fans have wondered if the company might come up with its own mobile hardware. Right now, there’s no proof that the acclaimed game developer is committing resources to this purpose, but a report from DigiTimes suggests that Nintendo could be a potential player in the gaming phone manufacturing market in the future.
According to this report, Nintendo might be one of those companies (alongside the likes of Vivo, Nubia, and Xiaomi) that are either planning to enter the market or looking to empower their presence in it.
The report also talks about the upcoming Razer 3 phone, which is going to be the third attempt from Razer to convince gamers to buy a gaming phone. It seems that even though Razer recently laid off 30 people from its team, it still intends to continue working on the Razer 3. The phone is expected to come out within this year.
Meanwhile, on Monday Xiaomi announced the Black Shark 2, a sequel to its own gaming phone series. The phone is advertised to have incredibly high specs, including Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 CPU and 12GB RAM. On the other hand, while the iQOO from Vivo is not specifically categorized as a gaming phone, it certainly has enough hardware powers to rival one.
The report claims that there were “speculations” that Nintendo is planning to release a new gaming mobile gaming device that supports integration with the Switch. However, Nintendo has not made any comment about these speculations.
The Nintendo Switch came out just a little bit over 2 years ago, and the company’s focus right now is clearly on supporting this platform. As a result, it’s unlikely that it will launch any new hardware (except maybe a Switch refresh) in the foreseeable future. Still, moving forward mobile will play a key role in Nintendo’s plans, so a gaming phone from the company might not be out of the realm of possibility.