Nintendo DSi

[Magus]

During their Fall Press Conference today, Nintendo have - as expected - announced a new version of the Nintendo DS. Called the Nintendo DSi, it eschews the GBA slot (boo!) in favour of a slight downsizing (it's a little thinner) and a range of improvements. The handheld's screens have been enlarged, and will now be 17% bigger (at 3.25 inches) than those found on the DS Lite. As for the rumoured additions, both have proven to be correct, with "audio enhancements" made to the handheld, while it will also now include a .3 megapixel (640x480) camera. And that's just the start of it.

The DSi also features an SD memory card slot, making it possible to take pictures with the DSi and then view them on the Nintendo Wii. The DSi features a built-in browser, and it's possible to download games and keep them on the DSi.



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Nintendo typically makes pretty likable stuff, but this seems kinda like a waste to me. The two webcams are nice, but everything else is a little too sub-par. Especially sense it's $30 more than the DS Lite. Anyone plan on getting this?

[rbcp]

What good are cams to gaming anyway?  I've seen a lot of webcam games, none of them being very entertaining.  Maybe they're planning on making video chat rooms.  I don't see why they had to make the case thinner either.  Instead, use that extra space for more battery to compensate for the extra power those bigger screens are going to draw.

We've got too many GBA games to want to upgrade anytime soon.

[Godot]

I still have two questions:

1. Do mod/homebrew carts still work with it?
2. Does is support WPA? (DS and DS Lite only do WEP.)

[MattGSX]

That Kotaku article is really old; there are better post-release reviews of this.

The DSi is made to better compete with the PSP's in-firmware features, the IPod Touch's new game engine, and to better match the appearance of the Wii.

The cameras, as far as I can tell, don't serve much extra function. There probably are some new games that will incorporate them, but it will likely be minimal and social-based. The main improvement is the web browser built into the firmware, which  still sucks compared to Bunjalloo, but is worth the price increase (as $DS Lite + $Opera Browser > $DSi). This use of wi-fi also opens up some more options, as Nintendo is allowing users to purchase and download additional games, software, and playable content, to be saved on an SD card. They removed the slot-2 functionality to make this work, so I'm not sure if the DSi still actually emulates a GBA, but I'm imagining Nintendo will sell downloads of GBA games to make up for this.

As far as homebrew goes - no slot-2 devices will work anymore, for obvious reasons. All slot-1 manufacturers have released NEW versions of their cards, so even though homebrew does still work on the DSi, the old cards apparently don't.

One thing this article fails to mention - the DSi's being sold in the US right now are Japanese systems, and since Nintendo is region-protecting games, it will only play Japanese releases. You also need to get a power converter in order to plug in the AC adapter. When NOA makes a DSi US release, I bet Gamestop, Gamecrazy, and other chains will do a trade-in deal like they did for the DS (GBA to DS) and DS Lite (DS to DS-Lite), where old system + $25-50 gets you new system. However, if the DSi is half as popular as the wii is, most of the buyers will be scalpers who are trying to artificially inflate demand.

Edit: To answer the WPA question; to the best of my knowledge, it still doesn't support WPA. Nintendo didn't do anything to improve client recognition on networks (which means I still couldn't go online at school), so I can't imagine they've improved their encryption protocol.

[rbcp]

Anyone else get one yet?

2. Does is support WPA? (DS and DS Lite only do WEP.)

NO.  It's retarded.  I had to buy one of those stupid USB wifi adapters for it.  How could they leave out WPA?

It's pretty neat so far.  There's a Wario game that uses motion from the camera for you to play.  That's what all the gaming system do - they come out with a camera and make 1 or 2 games that use the camera and aren't really that fun and then that's the end of using the camera.  At least it takes fairly good pictures and lets you store them on an SD card and there's some fun picture editing tools.

It plays music files...in AAC format.  No mp3 files!  Why would they leave out mp3?  There's a neat sound editing application, though, which lets you store sound clips and modify them.

The DS Shop has a total of 6 games to download.  The only free download was the Opera web browser, which does a great job of displaying websites.  The only other thing worth downloading was the Wario game.  Hopefully they get some more stuff in there soon.  At least they were nice enough to start us out with 1000 points.