Rumours of a potential mobile handset finding its way out of Nintendo R&D towers have been quashed in a statement from the ‘casual gaming’ giant.

The info was divulged in an interview with the New York Times and has come straight from the top of Nintendo USA; the company president no less, “Telephony is not in our wheelhouse. It’s not something I anticipate us getting into”, said Reggie Fils-Aime.

This will come as a bit of a blow for Nintendo fans that had been hoping to see the realisation of Nintendo mobile designs that surfaced on the net a long while back.

The designs came to light an internet eon after being patented way back in 2001, but these recent statements from Reggie seem to put the kibosh on this idea, for now at least.

Thankfully, this doesn’t mean that Nintendo has thrown the notion of always-on gaming out of the window, which means that we may be seeing a 3G, or faster, connection in the next hand-held gaming device to come out of Kyoto.

So that’s Nintendo out of the hand-held gaming/mobile hybrid market, which pretty much leaves it wide open for Sony and Nokia; who’s going to step-up first?