• Believe the Hype: Nintendo’s new DSi

    No comments yetPosted in GizmosOct 2, 2008

    It’s not exactly what I wanted it to be, nor expected it to become: Nintendo’s new DSi is still one pleasant surprise.  Where do I begin?

    New Nintendo DSi

    Source: http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/kotaku/2008/10/dsi3.jpg

    It’s got a camera.  0.3-megapixels.  Whatever, right?

    SD-card for MP3 playback.  That sounds pretty interesting, especially considering the possibilities now that storage is available on the DS officially.  If you’ve heard of R4, you’ll know that this opens up for piracy — basically, you can play ROMs of games on your DS that you can download for free.  SD cards make this much more budget-friendly (as opposed to smaller MicroSD cards), but also open up much more storage (SDHC is going up to 32GB, although I’m not 100% sure whether or not the DSi will be fully compatible with SDHC).

    Bigger screen — 17% bigger, making it a “whopping” 3.25 inches.  Not too bad — I could always use more screen real estate.

    NO GAMEBOY ADVANCE SUPPORT. Unfortunate, considering how I still have many GBA games I’d love to play on my DS (Pokemon Sapphire and Final Fantasy: Tactics Advanced come to mind).  For a split second, it makes me concerned, but I realize that it would have to eventually be purged — out with the old, in with the new.

    Last thing to be considered: connection with the Wii, which I thought was the main selling-point.  It’s got some Photo-sharing feature — nothing big, in my opinion (how many photos have you got on your iPod?  thought so).  Not to be ignored is its DSiWare Store: similar to WiiWare, DSiWare is downloadable content for your DSi.  This somewhat excites me, as this sounds like a more legitimate way to be using the SD storage.

    All in all, the DSi is shaping into a very interesting contender.  However, I would’ve liked its connection with the Wii to be stronger, somehow.  Sadly, we in the North Americas will have to wait until late 2009 to be able to pick the DSi up off a shelf, so don’t hold your breath.  Or, fly over to Japan and pick it up next month.

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