Nintendo DSi Review

New Interface & Connectivity

The DSi comes with an entirely new interface which is miles ahead of the previous DS interface. As shown in Figure 11, small boxes show up for the menu choices. From left to right you have System Settings, DS Game Card, DSi Camera, DSi Sound, DSi Shop, DS Download Play, PictoChat, and Downloaded Games. You can use your stylus or the control arrows to scroll through them and make choices. You can also drag them to new locations with the stylus. The new interface is smooth and user-friendly.  Another big improvement is the fact that you can now change games through the interface rather than having to restart the device.

Figure 11: New interface.

We use the connectivity of the DS Lite mostly to play games with other nearby users. Although you can get online with the DS Lite, it only allowed you to access WEP or unprotected Wi-Fi networks, which most folks are smart enough to avoid.

The DSi now also supports WPA encrypted Wi-Fi connections. We could not get the connectivity going with a WPA network by simply following the icons on the DSi or the instructions in the manual, but we were able to get it going by following the online instructions at the Nintendo website.

Once online, we immediately downloaded the free Opera web browser. The browser has been reworked and actually could be used for some simple browsing. We found ourselves willing to use it for simple functions like finding sports scores. The dual screens come in handy on the web because one of the screens shows you the part of the web page that is magnified on the other screen. So you don’t get lost when navigating through the page on a small screen.

After investigating surfing on the DSi, we visited the DSi store where we used the free points that came with the DSi to download several games. As previously mentioned the number of games is very limited. We downloaded  WarioWare Snapped!, which looked like the game that took the best advantage of the camera, but found it cumbersome to play. However, we loved the fact that the game took pictures of you during the play and showed you those after the game was over. This was amusing and quite fun. One of the keys to the success of this device will be whether more games that take advantage of the camera and sound can be developed.

Unfortunately, we quickly found that surfing the web and visiting the DSi store were the only things that we could do over the WPA network. You can only play online with others if you are using an unprotected network or a network with the pathetic WEP protection.

The DSi store functioned quite well, but we found that you can only play DSiWare games from the internal storage, so when your DSi fills up, you have to shuffle games between the memory card and the DSi. This is totally unacceptable. The good news is the DSi supports firmware updates. Nintendo recently sent a firmware update to the Wii that allows it to play games from the memory card. We can only hope that they do the same for the DSi.

Aggravatingly, the Nintendo Wii and the DSi cannot share Nintendo points. You have to purchase point s that are used for either the Wii or the DSi, but not both. One pool of Nintendo points that could be used on either machine would be highly preferable.