DS 2 information leaked?

Although the DS is still selling very strong with all of its 900 versions, there has been a bit of information leaked about the eventual DS 2.  Raymond Padilla was at GDC this year and managed to gather some information about the upcoming portable.

” -The system has two screens, just like the DS, but they are bigger and higher resolution. I’m sure most of you could have guessed that, but the interesting part is that the gap between the two screens is negligible. Developers will be able to use them as one giant screen. At the very least, this will allow for some awesome cutscenes. It also has some potentially cool gameplay potential, with developers shifting the action from dual screen to single screen depending on the situation.

-The next Nintendo handheld has an accelerometer. I blame the iPhone for this. Everything has to have an accelerometer now. Yesterday I bought a sandwich at the Moscone Center and it had an accelerometer in it.

-The dev kit is similar in power to the GameCube. Developers that worked on GameCube or Wii games will find it easy to create with. I found this information unusual. The DS successor is rumored to use an Nvidia Tegra chip, while the GameCube and Wii have PowerPC CPUs and ATI GPUs. The people familiar with the dev kit made it sound like there wasn’t much of a learning curve on the new system. I have to admit that I’m not familiar enough with Tegra, but I imagined developing for a system-on-a-chip platform to be different enough from developing for a CPU/GPU system. It could be ignorance on my part or maybe the DS2 uses something other than Tegra.

-The developers I spoke with will be finished with their games before the end of the year. The Nintendo DS is still going strong and the company could delay the next handheld’s release if it wanted to, but it looks like an E3 2010 announcement and a late 2010 release.”

You can read his full article here!

If any of this is true then fans of the DS will surely be pleased by this news.  I can see an announcement this year, but I don’t see it being released this year.  The DS has and is selling strongly and is supported quite well.  We’ll see soon enough!