Sony and Google's rumoured partnership may be the gaming phone news of today, but sources speaking with Pocket Gamer reckon that a few years back, Nintendo was in bed with a phone company too.
That company was Nokia, and during the early 2000s the Finnish phone giant and Nintendo had plans to release a portable gaming device that doubled as a phone. These plans - with the device being worked on by Nintendo's R&D team in Japan - made it all the way up to Nintendo's board of directors before being binned.
Its deal with Nintendo coming to nothing, Nokia would then go on to release its own gaming/phone hybrid, the N-Gage, and, well. Yeah. It was rubbish.
No reason was given for why Nintendo backed out of the plan, but seeing as this would have taken place at the same time as planning for the DS, perhaps they wisely saw which of the two devices had a brighter future?
We're following up with Nintendo, and will update if we hear anything back.
Exclusive: Nokia Nintendo phone went through R&D at Nintendo HQ [Pocket Gamer]