In a recent blog post at Kotaku, the question is posed: is Nintendo releasing a 3DS Lite?. A more apt question would be when is Nintendo releasing a 3DS Lite? Nintendo has released updated versions of every single handheld it has ever produced: Game Boy got both a Pocket update and a Light version, Game Boy Advance was retrofitted into a folding SP and later scaled down to Micro size, and Nintendo DS got a sleeker, slimmer Lite followed by an i and an XL. Not counting the six years between the original Game Boy release and Pocket update, Nintendo has retrofitted its handheld hardware within two years on average (GBA 2001, SP 2003, Micro 2005; DS 2004, Lite 2006, DSi 2008, DSiXL 2009). With 3DS sales booming (4 million sold in the US alone), we can expect a hardware update sometime within the next 14 months. However two major factors, low battery life and the lack of a second analog stick, may push a hardware update even sooner.