Cubed³ is reporting on a new press release issued by eSol Co., Ltd., indicating that Nintendo has entered into an agreement with the company to license their FAT file system and USB host support for embedded systems, to be used in Nintendo’s Wii console. Cube³ believes that this may be pointing to an external USB storage system coming for the Wii some time soon. However, the press release seems worded oddly for a new addition to the Wii. For instance, eSol’s Executive Vice President, Embedded Products says this:

I am very happy that we could take part in the development for Wii, a new game console from Nintendo. I believe that our products were selected because Nintendo highly-valued our long, successful history with many digital consumer products and high-reliability and functionality based on that. We will continue to provide superior products and technical services to strongly support developers in embedded software development.

This statement seems to indicate that eSol was involved during the console development process, and this licensing is not a new thing. Why the company is issuing a press release now about this seems somewhat odd, though. Still, even if this is not new functionality in the Wii, this announcement would indicate that Nintendo could potentially enable the feature in the Wii to allow USB-based storage in the future.