Nintendo’s upcoming successor to its vastly successful dual-screened handheld, the appropriately named 3DS, has been kept well under wraps, but it seems that the guts of the device have now been photographed.

Well, if the screens are different sizes this mockup gets thrown out

While there’s been no official confirmation of just what the board pictured is, the rumours surrounding it seem to indicate that it could be either a test board that Nintendo has submitted to the FCC to get approval for a new wireless card as part of continuous updates to its DS hardware or a first shot of the innards of the new, 3D capable device. That much at least was reported by the folks at Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry when they first got their hands on the hardware, but it’s since been pointed out that there are some differences between the current DS line and the hardware above.

The first is that the board shown above boasts screens in a different aspect ratio to Nintendo’s current DS line, the screens on which are 4:3, while one of the displays on the test board looks an awful lot more like a 16:9. While it had been known before now that the device would likely boast two displays in order to ensure backwards compatibility with Nintendo’s DS, there hasn’t yet been solid confirmation from Nintendo. Some had suggested that the device could simply play DS games through one larger display split across its centre.

This is the shot of the hardware that's been doing the rounds

Regardless, this arrangement, if it does belong to the upcoming 3DS, seems very interesting indeed. The fact that the two displays are so markedly different would also seem to indicate that, in a fashion similar to the DS’s touch-sensitivity, only one of the displays will be capable of displaying in 3D.

We’ll be curious to see what Nintendo shows off at this year’s E3, when its rumoured to be unveiling the device officially. It’s also been suggested that Sony could be ramping up to show off its own next-generation handheld at the same time…