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I too have way more skylanders than I need, originally targetting 8 (one of each element) and now having over 20 as well."

Nothing wrong with that though."

I think I'm pretty much over smartphones myself. If I didn't have one provided by work, I'd probably be using a 3G Android Tablet + a dumb phone instead of a smart phone by now. (If we had options other than Android, iOS, and Microsoft I might still enjoy smart phones, but I hate all 3 of the most prevalent OSes in smart phones. I really used to like my Palm Centro phone though.)"

I think the game companies are recognizing more that they need a more solid lineup from the start, and hopefully the Wii U launch lineup will be more like the Vita's lineup, with good solid games across many genres in the first 3-4 months. With Call of Duty coming out for both systems, it should be able to garner at least a decent audience.

One thing to note, the Wii U's hardware capabulities mean that it will only get cross platform games from the PS3/360 generation, which means about 2-3 years into its life cycle it'll start losing ground on those titles and have to fall back to Nintendo's traditional strengths. They will however have one system that they can lean on for cross platform games even after that. If the Vita succeeds and keeps going for 6-7 years, then the Wii U will still have a decent selection of cross platform titles to lean on.

But it's going to be back to a 3-leveled market again with the release of the new sony/ms consoles. The 3ds picking up the low end, the Vita and Wii U in the middle, and the next Xbox/Playstation/PC at the high end. This is a lot like the last generation, and often the PSP and Wii would lose out on cross platform games because their market strength together wasn't enough to justify the port. The Wii U seems to have more third party support, and the Vita's been pretty strong on software at least, so hopefully we'll not see the same pattern repeat."

Sony is likely to keep bluray, there's still life in the 50gig discs. I don't know if they're going to adopt any of the denser versions of bluray, such as the 100 or 200gig discs. I haven't seen any movement on those techs in quite a while in fact.

Also from rumors, Microsoft is going with a PowerPC chip paired up with a mid-range fusion video card on the same die. This should give them a solid boost from the xbox360, but cost a heck of a lot less to produce than the 360 did initially.

Similarly, rumors say that Sony is going over to ATI and is also using Fusion products, but they're switching off PPC over to an x64 Bulldozer module style system with stacked dies, and putting a lower-high end video chip on. The benefit to fusion with stacked dies is that it'll cost a bit more up front, but it'll be much easier to reduce it down to a single die when they start doing chip shrinks for later models, in keeping with Sony's focus on making a second and third spin of their consoles at a much cheaper price. Of course, stacked dies isn't a perfected tech yet, so there will be some risk involved.

I doubt we're going to hear about them at E3. Sony and MS are still doing a bit of a staring contest, neither one wants to end this generation just yet, but neither also wants to be the last to market with the next generation of consoles. Whichever one gets hit upside the head with market forces first will be the first to blink and announce a new console, and the other will follow right up with their own plans as soon as they can get someone out in front of a microphone.

I also imagine the next generation isn't going to be the budget buster that the last generation was. I expect the top end will be around $400-450 max. I imagine MS is going to try and shoot for Wii U's $250 price slot. They've really shifted and are trying to steal the niche that Wii created as the Wii's faded out.

Also, I expect the Wii U will be another 4-year console just like the Wii was. The Wii hung around for 6, but it pretty much slid into oblivion in the last 2 years. Hopefully nintendo has planned for the Wii U's eventual replacement.

To me, the biggest thing that Sony could do to improve right now could be done with the PS3. They really need to build up their CDN. Put servers at various ISPs and datacenters around the country. Right now PSN is very uneven, some areas get blistering fast performance, some areas crawl. I have a 30 megabit connection and PSN crawls for me because their datacenters are too far away on the internet."