Following a week or two of rumours and speculation, Nintendo has finally ‘fessed up and admitted that they’re planning to launch a successor to the Wii sometime next year.
In a private investor correspondence with shareholders, the company says that the new console will be shown off at E3 in June.

“RE: Wii’s successor system: Nintendo Co. Ltd has decided to launch in 2012 a system to succeed Wii, which the company has sold 86.01 million units on a consolidated shipment basis between its launch in 2006 and the end of March 2011,” reads the memo.

“We will show a playable model of the new system and announced more specifications at the E3 Expo, which will be held June 7-9 2011 in Los Angeles.”

According to industry spies, the new console is codenamed “Project Café”, and features a custom IBM PowerPC CPU with three cores, a GPU from the ATI R700 range, with a shader unit at version 4.1, and at least 512Mb of RAM. Which puts it pretty much on par with the Xbox 360 and PS3. The same source claims the controller includes a built-in, six inch touchscreen. None of this stuff has been confirmed by Nintendo, of course.

“We would like to propose a new approach to home video game consoles” with the next Wii, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata tells Bloomberg. Just don’t expect a TV-sized 3DS. “It’s difficult to make 3D images a key feature, because 3D televisions haven’t obtained wide acceptance yet.”