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Image : Tom Phillips

An investigation by Eurogamer ' s Tom Phillips discovered the NX will be a high-powered portable device , with two detachable controllers fixed to the side .

The move would be a radical departure from traditional console design , while building on the controller-heavy focus of the Wii and Wii U .

Other handheld features being added to the next generation machine may include cartridges instead of discs for game media .

Phillips said : " Naturally , we expect digital game downloads will also be available . We were told Nintendo considered but then decided against making a system which supported

digital downloads only ."

In 2009 , Sony attempted to release a hardware upgrade called the PSP Go , which ran exclusively digital downloads . They faced a backlash from brick and mortar game stores , many of which refused to stock the device , and it is widely considered a failure .

One advantage of cartridges over discs as a form of media is that they offer much faster load times owing to their solid state memory format . This comes with the trade-off of higher costs per gigabyte , and the Eurogamer report suggested a standard size could be 32GB - a little bigger than a single-layer Blu-Ray disc .

The detachable controllers would suggest the system is capable of connecting to a TV for traditional console

play , so we might expect to see at very least an HDMI port included .

Due to the radical hardware changes envisaged , it seems unlikely that backwards compatibility will be a feature . The Wii and Wii U were , after all , unusual in being able to play games from previous generations .

Where Nintendo has long had the advantage over its rivals has been on console price , and a system built on a mobile chipset ( the Nvidia Tegra has been reported ) would certainly cost less than a traditional console .

Android-based gaming tablets are available from around the £ 100 mark , though the NX is likely to make use of high-end hardware and a custom operating system , adding to the user cost .