The truly great part of this industry is that you can argue for weeks with fellow editors about whether a company will reveal a new product or not, only to have the news emerge when you least expect it, in the oddest way. Or so my theory goes while waking up to this short and to the point press note on Nintendo of Japan’s site apparently offering confirmation of a successor to the DS line – the Nintendo 3DS.

If you haven’t heard everywhere else by now, the 3 stands for 3D – the only real information so far being that the handheld will allow for 3D effects without the use of special glasses. This has a lot of people thinking back to a recently released game in Japan that uses the DSi camera to simulate movement and depth on screen.

Of course that’s only one way of thinking about 3D, so there’s plenty of room to speculate about what exactly Nintendo has in mind while waiting for more information at this year’s E3.

In the meantime I’m going to busy myself thinking about how a company like Q-Games could make interesting experiments with 3D handheld tech.