We have long conceded that Japanese gaming giant Nintendo is not likely to get into the smartphone business. Heck, maybe even the company itself has conceded that their hardware business just isn’t up to par – judging from the lack of effort to update the Wii and Nintendo DS mobile platforms. But we begin to think what could be, with this — when asked to concoct a concept based on a classic gadget that could have a life as a smartphone, Bangkok-based designer Pierre Cerveau came up with this beauty: the Nintendo Smart Boy.
You heard it right, the concept is a Nintendo Game Boy re-imagined as a modern smartphone, but keeping the spirit of what the classic mobile game console was all about. And looking at the renders that the designer published, we can’t help but keep throwing money at our screens hoping that the Internet would somehow magically give us in return something this beautiful and amazing.
The concept isn’t really too far off that it can’t get made, the problem is if Nintendo will actually build it. It has a cool gaming-inspired display and that nice Game Boy look and feel on the exterior. Cerveau’s craziest ideas will probably be the Game Boy cartridge-inspired hot swappable modules for more storage, an additional battery pack, or a 3D camera. The designer also though up a controller add-on that gives additional battery power.
The concept is possible, and we despair at the thought that we don’t already have anything like this available. Heck, even the Android side of the design has a Game Boy-inspired “Easter egg” – a power saving mode that brings down the display to the “8-bit” green display we have all come to know and love from the original monochrome Game Boy. After seeing this, we only have one question: which gaming gods do we have to pray to just so this can happen?
The last image render above was Cerveau’s tribute to the late Satoru Iwata, the president of Nintendo who passed away just as the designer was finishing his renders last week.
SOURCE: Pierre Cerveau
This looks mighty fine.
I would jump on this out of sheer impulse. I don’t think that they would have much of an issue garnering a large market, either.
Really, it’s cool, it would potentially run Android, and there has already been rumblings that Nintendo was going to make the leap to mobile gaming.
We all can dream, though.