On the heels of my forwarding the idea that Nintendo should be making their own phones in this piece about Nintendo, The Japan Times reports that Big N is doing the opposite:

Nintendo Co. is trying to modify its game consoles so customers can use smartphone applications on them as it searches for a way to return to profitability, company sources said.

The game console and software maker has offered professional-use conversion software to application developers so they can produce smartphone games that can be played on Wii U, a struggling home video game console that helped widen the firm’s operating loss in fiscal 2012.

The way this reads implies that they are trying to create iOS and Android middleware that will make it easy for those developers to port existing games to Wii U. That doesn't change the fact that people will be more likely to carry those games around on their non-Nintendo smartphones.

Nintendo hopes smartphone software will help spur console sales, which will in turn lead to an increase in popular game titles for them, the sources said.

They will have to massively simplify their interface, and make the long-needed move of unifying the Virtual Console for both the Wii U and the 3DS, with Apple-like redownloading. The biggest problem facing Nintendo is that, like Toho Co., they are a 100-year-old company run by 100-year-old men. They will look at backward solutions like this instead of proper overhaul tactics. Even when things are broken, the solutions do not go far enough to properly correct their course. They still view themselves internally as a Japanese company that happens to have a "foreign" audience, instead of a global company based in Japan.

Nintendo will also focus on developing new software on its own, the sources said.

The entire contents of the story read like a controlled leak designed to shape this story as "Nintendo on the upswing". The software they should be focusing on is their own Android fork ("NintendOS"?) to go with their own phone hardware.