Well, this is quite a big rumor. I’ll just post highlights from the article…

Launched in 2004, the Nintendo DS and its two latter redesigns [DS Lite and DSi] sold in massive 111.49 million units. With almost 40 million handheld consoles sold in United States alone, Nintendo DS owns 68.3% of worldwide market share.

As the time passed by, Nintendo started to work on the successor of its handheld console with a debut planned for late 2010 [Tokyo Game Show?]. According to our confidential sources, Nintendo is going to use Tegra System-on-Chip processor for the successor of DS/DSi handheld console. Unlike the current design, nVidia offered a single-chip proposal to Nintendo, a company famous for keeping the hardware platform absolutely simple.

Given the fact that Nintendo DS hardware is based upon 16-bit and 32-bit ARM cores, it looks like Next-Gen DS could be backwards compatible with the DS application library. According to our sources, all of the apps that came for old DS could run on a single ARM11 core, yet alone the next-gen CorTex-A9-based Tegra, leaving graphics subsystem to do “something smarter”.

Do I believe this? I’m leaning towards no, but it’s not a complete no. Depending on which chips they choose (and the full article speculates about this), this could be a huge graphical upgrade from the DS. Nintendo has never really focused on graphics, except maybe with the N64. Not only that but, the DSi just released earlier this year and DSi-exclusive retail titles are slowly being announced now. Having said that, 2010 would mean the DS had a 6 year run and this next-gen DS will still be able to play DS games. What do you think? Could there be any truth to this rumor?

Note: The image above is completely un-related concept art.

[Via BSN and NeoGAF]