"No plans" for DS redesign at E3 - David Yarnton

Nintendo UK's general manager David Yarnton has reiterated that the company has no plans to announce a redesigned DS unit at this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz in an interview published on the website today, Yarnton said, "If I turned around and said to my staff that we're doing something new they'd probably throttle me."

Pressed on the issue of a possible redesign for the high-flying handheld, which recently broke through the one-million-UK-sales barrier, Yarnton said, "That's been rumoured, I don't know for how long, but we haven't got any plans at the moment. Nothing I know of."

Yarnton also had encouraging words for retailers, speaking at an event at the Science Museum in London yesterday. "You know, we've got plans for long-term that we're going to invest in it and in the past, I wouldn't say it's been neglected, but change is happening.

"I find one of the challenges we have as a company is resource as far as, you know, we've got 16 people at Nintendo UK which I think a lot of people don't realise for the amount of business we do. But we're looking at improving that resource. We don't think we need to grow too much more, it's just being responsive and working closely - as I say we had a trade presentation this morning and we presented to them a number of initiatives as far as simple things like in-store... I mean, we go out to stores and look and we're the poor relation in some respects, so we can't expect them to do that unless we give the more support so we're working in that area."