Nintendo Working on Mii Smartphone App

A recent interview with Nikkei saw Nintendo president Satoru Iwata let an interesting cat out of the bag, as he mentioned a soon-to-be announced Mii-centric smartphone app.

When asked about how Nintendo is incorporating smartphones into their strategy, Iwata expressed his wariness about the smartphone realm, but said that anything Nintendo develops for phones will point consumers back to Nintendo products. "For example, some Nintendo game consoles incorporate Mii, which creates a digital avatar to represent players," Iwata explained. "It would be fun for players to use their Mii characters as icons on social media. We are currently developing an application that will allow users to do that. The app will be announced around the time our full-year results are released."

That means that a smartphone app that has something to do with Mii characters will be announced sometime in April or May, conveniently right before the biggest industry show of the year in E3 2015.

Iwata also talked about turning popular smartphone games into 3DS titles to lure new consumers to the device, saying, "it is also possible to turn smartphone games from other software makers into 3DS-compatible games and offer them for relatively low prices. We intend to pursue a variety of options. Only those products and services that receive strong support from customers will survive."

We understand Iwata's reluctance to give into the mobile world, and a smartphone app based on Miis is not a bad idea, but we can't shake the feeling that it's only a matter of time before Pokemon and Mario iOS take the world by storm. Uness Nintendo releases its own cell phone... which sounds crazy but probably isn't so farfetched.