I was a little surprised to find the Nintendo DSi in stock on launch day at my local Gamestop, in fact they said there was somewhere around 40 units available after preorders. I figured what the hell and picked one up, because, well I'm a gadget whore. I'll be honest, I didn't know much about the system other than it dropped the GBA slot in favor of a slimmer design, two cameras and bigger screens. I figured with a new baby here, I'm going to be doing plenty of mobile and impromptu gaming - why not do it in style?
The first thing you'll notice is the DSi has a matte finish instead of the glossy finish of the DS Lite. Gone are the fingerprints and in their place are scuff marks. It's honestly not THAT bad, and I actually prefer the new finish. The button layout is slightly changed as well, gone is the slide power and volume controls, and in their place are digital buttons on the side like a cell phone for volume and a gray power button on the face of the device. A nice touch with the new power button is the ability to tap it to exit a game and return to the brand newDSi interface.
As soon as I turned the system on a new firmware update was available, something which the DS Lite lacked the ability to do, and off I went into the interface. The interface will feel fairly familiar for Wii owners as it utilizes little channels to organize your different applications, and in some cases, even shares the same music and tones. Out of the box you'll find your Cartridge,DSi Camera, Settings, DSi Sound, DSi Shop, DS Download Play and Picto Chat. Using the DSi Shop channel you can download new games and applications to fill out your channels on the home screen. There's a handful of games available now, as well as a free version of the Operainternet browser. These items can be packaged and downloaded the DSi's internal memory or to an optional SD card. I say packaged because Nintendo went all cutesy and decided you need to "unwrap" your download from it's blue packaging shell - complete with bow.
The camera channel allows you to use one of the DSi's two cameras to snap photos of just about anything; the inward facing one of yourself, and the outward facing one of whatever poor soul you manage to use as a test subject. There's a handful of "real-time" filters you can apply to the photos adding things like frames, distortions, and even determining the similarity between two faces. I had some difficultly with the latter, I was only able to use it on my wife and daughter but could not get it to recognize my face and my daughter's at the same time. The photos are a minor amusement, ones that you can transfer back to your PC thanks to the built in SD card slot. A nice touch is the little calendar which shows you what day you took the pictures on - can you say time shift morph?
The sound channel lets you record your own sound files and distort and add filters to them. You can also playback AAC audio files from (unprotected) iTunes but you won't find any MP3 support here. During playback there's a handful of visualizers (like Excitebike!) and audio filter to apply in real time. It's a nice novelty, but not something you'd use every day for listening to music. I did have fun playing around with my voice and making it sing like a whole choir of me!
The screens themselves got a small update with a slightly larger size, it's one that without putting the system side by side with a DS Lite you probably won't notice. Still, in a game like GTA: Chinatown Wars I have to admit the characters seemed to pop off the screen a little bit more. It's probably more psychological than physical. The speakers are much improved, so much in fact, that in certain apps the "bass" of the system almost provides tactile feedback from pressing the on screen keyboard. The battery seems marginally better than my DS Lite through normal use, getting around 5 hours with heavy wi-fi use and about 12 hours without.
So is the DSi worth your hard earned dollar? I'd say if you haven't picked up a DS yet I'd go right for this version; otherwise you might need to make up an excuse to pick it up. Perhaps giving your significant other your old system so you can co-op one of the many co-op DS games together? It just might work.
Score: 4 out of 5
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