Nintendo: DS not Game Boy Advance's successor

TOKYO--In an interview conducted by Bloomberg Japan, Nintendo confirmed that the Nintendo DS, its newly announced portable dual-screen gaming system, is not being created to take over the Game Boy Advance's market. The company also confirmed that a separate machine is being developed as a next-generation successor for the GBA. According to Nintendo's public relations chief Yasuhiro Minagawa, "The development of succeeding machines for the GBA and Game Cube are in the works, separately from the Nintendo DS."

Nintendo's comments support their previous statements that they aim to release a new machine that is different from existing game devices. However, that doesn't completely rule out the possibility of the Nintendo DS having backwards compatibility to the GBA; the 32-bit ARM7 chip used as the CPU on the GBA is also used as the sub-processor on the Nintendo DS.