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Nintendo hit the ground running to prepare for its upcoming battle royal with Sony for the hearts and hands of mobile gamers. Sony will enter the portable gaming market, long dominated by Nintendo, on March 24th with the release of Playstation Portable (PSP).

The Kyoto-based company launched a huge media blitz to help sell over 1.3 million units of its new Nintendo DS platform in North America alone late last year.

DS boasts dual screens (one a touch-screen), voice-recognition, and two forms of wireless connectivity. 20 to 25 games should be available for the platform by the end of the month, with at least 125 more in development. DS is also backwards compatible with e more than 500 Game Boy Advance games.

If recent reports are correct, however, there's far more to DS than meets the eye.

Here's the story:

Since DS features a touchscreen, recent rumors about Nintendo licensing the Palm operating system (OS) from PalmSouce for its personal information management (PIM) applications makes sense.

The Palm OS would add a whole additional level of functionality to the device, helping it compete for market share in the "hybrid" gaming category, which features devices like TapWave's Zodiac and Nokia's N-Gage Series.

A deal with Nintendo could help the Palm licensor considerably. PalmSource is down to one major licensee in palmOne—a company that may turn to Windows Mobile for some of its devices—after the demise of Sony's Clie line of handhelds. It also fell behind Microsoft and its handheld platform for the first time last year.

The name of DS's Palm-based PIM suite is reported to be Nintendo V-Pocket.

SPOng.com reports Nintendo intended DS to become one of these "hybrid" devices all along. Except, and here's the real advantage, you would also be able to play Nintendo 64 quality games.

Purportedly, the timing of Nintendo's introduction of DS was a red herring designed to take some of the limelight away from Sony's launch of PSP. Nintendo will supposedly introduce the true successor to the Game Boy Advance SP at E3 this May.

If SPOng.com is right, the company is basing this new device on GameCube console hardware to use GameCube software. It would ship later this year.

At stake is—according to a May 2004 by Juipter Research report—an addressable audience of portable gamers that'll nearly double from 23 million to 43 million by 2009. That's a lot of thumbs connected to a lot hands that could be forking over a lot of money.

Juipter Research and this Web site are owned by the same company, Jupitermedia.