You raise some good points. It's true, the gaming climate has certainly changed since 2004, though personally I don't really imagine the smartphones and tablets offering the same kind of rich experiences the gaming-dedicated handhelds are capable of. Not in their current form, anyways. They're all games you can 'beat' in 20 minutes, and usually have the same sort of gameplay that you would have seen in an arcade 25 years ago. That's not a bad thing, but the difference is still worth pointing out.
What I imagine as the pinnacle of handheld gaming's evolution is to essentially have console-esque experiences that you can take with you on the crapper on the go. I have heard naysayers to this, some have said that they DON'T want console experiences on a handheld, that they prefer to play those on a TV. That's fine and all, but what the hell was the point of having the handheld industry evolve past the Gameboy Color, then? I love taking my games with me when I leave the house, being able to play games I once never thought I would see portable is a huge plus.
That said, Nintendo has mismanaged the 3DS. The hardware itself is fantastic, battery issues aside. But the online still feels ten years outdated, the friends list is almost pointless, the eShop is unorganized and overpriced, and the launch lineup was about as exciting as my grandparent's sex life. Which brings me to my next point:
While the current handheld industry is indeed different, that doesn't mean we should disregard the past all together. It's why we're taught history to begin with, so we can be sure we don't remake past mistakes. The world is vastly different from what it was 70 years ago, but that doesn't mean we should forget about WWII and ignore everything we learned from it. The same goes with gaming handhelds. The DS had almost as bad a launch-line up as the 3DS (The only 'killer ap' was Super Mario 64 DS...a remake of an N64 game. Sound familiar?), and was an empty husk of a system for about a full year. Does that guarantee success for the 3DS? Of course not, like you said, that line of thinking is pretty idiotic. The thing is Jim, as a regular reader of Destructoid, I saw you dismissing the 3DS a mere month into its cycle based off the launch line up alone- waaaaaaaay to early to be crying wolf. Few systems prove themselves in even their first year, let alone the first six months of its international release. It's not just the DS that can be used as a reference point either. For example, I thought the PS3 was an overpriced, gimmicky piece of crap that had no games for like the first two years, and I still stand by my claim. But now they've brought the price down, SixAxis is rarely used anymore, BluRay has become the leading format (I NEVER saw that coming during the HDDVD-BluRay wars) and most importantly: there are tons of great games. The N64 used a format that was outdated by 1996, and some of the games were ludicrously overpriced, even by today's standards. (A new copy of Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire cost $80 at the time, and this was 1996!) But by the time the N64 died, there were enough great games that it's now something of a cult-favorite.
Yes the 3DS has been mismanaged, yes Nintendo relied too much on an already-tired gimmick to sell the system, yes it has been suffering from a lack of quality games, yes the pricing on both the system and its games have been way too high, but history shows that this is no guarantee of failure, therefore we really shouldn't ignore history just because the industry has changed. The industry is ALWAYS changing, new systems ALWAYS have obstacles to overcome that their predecessors never even dreamed about. Let's not forget about the future, either. By the end of this year alone (A mere three months from the time of this writing), the 3DS will have Super Mario, Mario Kart, Sonic Generations, and Kid Icarus. And next year we'll get Metal Gear, Kingdom Hearts, Rune Factory, Animal Crossing, Luigi's Mansion, Professor Layton, and maybe even the Layton/Wright crossover. Just TRY to tell me the 3DS is absolutely 100% destined to fail. (Jim didn't say it was, but I see plenty of commenters here saying it)
