NTT Docomo to offer 3G-connected gaming consoles?

A new report says that Japan’s NTT Docomo is in talks with portable game console manufacturers to embed 3G modules into the devices. "We are discussing this with various players," Docomo president Ryuji Yamada said in an interview with Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal. He declined to identify the console manufacturers, but Nintendo’s DS and Sony’s PlayStation Portable are the two major portable gaming devices currently on the market. As a reminder, Nintendo has recently unveiled a new handheld device called the Nintendo 3DS.

Embedding wireless capability into gaming consoles is a logical development given the momentum behind the machine-to-machine and embedded mobile markets. The concept of an 'Internet of things' has been touted for a while (with carriers such as China Mobile, Sprint, AT&T, KPN, Telefonica and T-Mobile already announcing their own trials and initiatives), but there's now a real sense that operators and vendors are highly motivated to make this market work. Ericsson expects to see 50 billion connected devices by 2020, with the world's largest mobile network vendor claiming that this timeframe will coincide with some markets hitting 500 percent mobile penetration.