January 24, 2007

A New DS with bigger screens?

According to the rumor mills, (which I'm a bit late on picking up, apparently), Nintendo may be coming out with a(nother) new DS sometime this year.

Being the proud owner, as I am, of the DS Lite - I'm not sure whether or not I want this to be true. On the one hand - having a bigger screen could be good. The screens are a bit smallish. But, at the same time - bigger screens with the same resolution means the images don't look as sharp.

But even if you throw out the resolution debate - I'm not sure if I want my DS Lite to be outdated already. I mean I just bought the thing less than 8 months ago - and I bought it on launch day (in the US, anyway).

This did get me thinking, though. If I were to redesign the DS - what would it look like?

First of all - there would be bigger screen - but with higher resolutions. Think two 4" screens with VGA resolution (640 x 480) 4:3 OLED displays. (Current DS/Lites have two 3" TFT LCD screens - 256 x 192, 4:3.)

Then I'd have BlueTooth (so it could interact with the Wii, and with headsets, and keyboards, etc.), WiFi 802.11a/b/g/n, a 3.1 MP Camera, a microphone, a better set of speakers, and both screens would be touchable. It would also play old GameBoy games. (Currently the DS/Lite can only play GBA Game Boy Advance games - not Game Boy Color or Game Boy games.) I would also have a SD slot and support media files (mp3, OGG, mp4, avi, mov, aiff, wave, aac, ra, rm, etc.) and NES/SNES ROMs natively.

It might look a little something like this.

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Two touchable screens seems like too much to me... but it's just my opinion.

I personally wouldn't mind a normal single-screened handheld with a screen a tiny bit bigger than the psp's. the whole "let's change the way you play!" thing isn't appealing to me.

Nintendo's starting to act like apple "Lets make a "new" version of our product every few months!