Over the weekend, a couple of reports surfaced online, talking about a new kind of Nintendo DS to come out later this year. Japanese newspaper Nikkei was first to break the news, unfortunately, their report was never really clear with its source (much less had any confirmation from Nintendo).

See, in the original report, Nikkei talked of the new DS that Nintendo's supposedly cooking up: it's got a built-in camera (as opposed to the attachable DS camera peripheral - as seen in the pic above) and allows music playback functions. Think DS, digicam, and mp3 player... all in one handheld. Too good to be true? Perhaps.

Supposedly, this is nothing but pure speculation and rumor. Nintendo of America has already responded to this "DS-mp3-cam", telling Kotaku that:

The Nikkei newspaper wrote a recent story about a DS solely based upon their own research and speculation, without interviewing Nintendo. While Nintendo is always working on new hardware, we have not made any announcement about a DS and we cannot comment on the Nikkei story.

Nintendo Japan has also already responded to the new DS model, saying that they are "always developing new products. However, since nothing has been announced officially, we are unable to comment at this time."

Which doesn't count for much since they neither confirmed nor utterly debunked the rumor. Both statements from Nintendo Japan and America are the usual "no comment" replies - in certain cases, this is one symptom that the rumor is actually true.

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