First Thirty: DSi

By Joe Fourhman | April 5, 2009

No worries about DSi shortages over here; every store I checked this morning was chock full of them! And you can have any color you want, as long as it’s black or blue.

The black matte finish is very nice. I’ve been grubbing with it for half an hour and it remains charmingly resistant to fingerprints. Guess what, Nintendo grenaded the accessories market again… the DSi has a new stylus design (longer than the Lite’s stylus) and a new AC charger. The headset jack in the front is the same as the Lite’s. The volume control is now a digital +/- button (like a cell phone) instead of that fiddly slider on the Lite. There are camera icons on the L and R shoulder buttons that seem entirely unnecessary.

There was a required System Update as soon as I turned it on and attempted to set up my WiFi. The DSi has the exact same WiFi settings as the DS Lite, and another three settings slots for “advanced” settings, which I assume will allow for the DSi to break into more secure WiFi environments. The manual mentions “Nintendo Zones” which I guess will serve as branded WiFi hotspots tailored for DSi usage. Has anybody heard of the term “Nintendo Zone” before?

If you’ve been following the DSi all this time, there is little that will surprise you. The photo feature does all the silly crap you’ve seen demoed… lots of filters to mess with your pics, either live or after they’ve been snapped. The native format is JPG and the pics are reasonably nice, 640×480. If you save the pics to the SD card, you can easily pop them up on your computer. Here’s some of mine:

Click either to see the unmolested DSi original file. Conker’s photo has one of the built-in frames applied to it. Speed lines!

The DSi randomly selects one of your pictures to fill the top screen when you are at the system menu! Keen!

When you first go into the photo menu, you get a brief tutorial showing off the filters and such. It also points out that the DSi will make a shutter click sound effect whether you have the volume muted or not! So there goes your plan for upskirts on the subway.

My DSi says it can hold another 400 pics in its onboard memory. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I can’t seem to find a way to shift pictures from the SD card to the built-in memory and vice-versa.

Here’s the SD card filepath. The DSi inserts a little “initialization file” onto your SD card.

As you can see, the JPGs are stored into the standard DCIM folder. They show up right away in iPhoto. Nintendo’s mystery file is buried inside the “private” folder.

The SD card hinge seems like an engineering misfire. It is a thin strip of bendable plastic that goes out and down, not simply down. Weird.

The music player only reads AAC files from your SD card (or M4A, which is the MPG wrapper that iTunes uses for AAC songs.) Seems strange that Nintendo would not support MP3, but that is no doubt due to the fees required for making a device MP3-compatible. Somebody correct me if I’m making an ass out of myself here. Audio file formats was not my major in college.

You may have heard Nintendo crowing about how you can “play” with your music. This is a minor amusement at best. First of all, there are some bitchin’ visualizers. You can see an Excitebike-themed visualizer in this shot:

While the song is playing, you can screw with it live by warping the speed, or by adding in your own sound effects. There are some audio filters that sort-of-impressively turn your song into an instrumental (it subtracts the voice) or translates it into 8-bit beeps. These are all as easy as clicking buttons, and there is no delay to the song itself. Sure, sure. But somehow I doubt many people are going to use the DSi as an iPod-substitute and then want to make the tracks all sound like Old-Tyme Radio.

I registered my DSi system at Club Nintendo for a free 90 day warranty extension, plus 160 coins!

For the next six months, all DSi owners get a 1000-point credit to the DSiWare Store account. I’m not sure why Nintendo now has to have TWO fake currencies, Wii Points and DSi Points, but whatever.

I used exactly zero of those points to download the free web browser. As you download something, Mario and the cast of SMB2 run around the screen filling a bucket which acts as a progress bar.

The browser (which is very similar to the Wii’s Opera browser) takes up about 70 blocks of the DSi’s 1000 onboard memory blocks. Here’s what it does to Aeropause.com. The top screen shows a zoomed-out, normal-looking web browser view:

While the bottom screen shows the highlighted area, all zoomed in and stuff.

YouTube does not run. Looks like javascript does. The browser pulls the favicon.ico (top left), which is nice. Overall, it’s not anything you would call fast, but it’s not bad for free. I’m glad I never bought that $30 DS Lite Browser!

When you download something, it initially shows up in your DSi menu as an unopened gift. Then you have to click the gift to have the application appear. Genius! This is one of those cutesy touches that proves Nintendo’s natural charm. Like the Help Cat from the Wii’s Photo Channel.

Here at the end of DSi Day One, it seems obvious that the DSi is all about potential. I’m the slightest bit woozy from the $170 price tag. Seriously, is this thing $40 better than a DS Lite? Or just-under-half as good as a PS3? But I’m excited by the prospect of downloadable portable games and the new features will give future DSi-enhanced games a lot of power to draw from.