Western Nintendo DSi details, no MP3 playback!

Mike Bantick
Friday, 03 October 2008 07:51

Your IT - Entertainment

The SanFrancisco Nintendo press conference has just past, North American Nintendo president Reggie Fils-Aime’s has expanded on the Nintendo DSi Japanese announcement.  A clarification of the release date and specifications caused audience exclamations.

So the new Nintendo DS hardware has been announced, launched in Japan Nintendo have added and taken away some features from the handheld gaming device that has dominated sales charts over the globe.

In a nutshell, the Nintendo DSi, as it has been dubbed, has a bigger screen, a camera, some on board memory plus an SD slot to expand this.  The DSi loses the GameBoy Advance slot, but gains expanded Wi-Fi capabilities, a web browser and digital music playback.

On the backend, there is also a couple of online stores to download homebrew and classic games from – at a cost. 

iTWire colleague Alex Zaharov-Reutt covers off many of these features here .

But there were some questions remaining after the Japan press conference.  North American Nintendo president Reggie Fils-Aime speaking in San Francisco, had his chance yesterday to give the western spin to the  Japanese launch.

For clarification, the Nintendo DSi will not see retail shelves outside of Japan until “well into 2009”.

And around the question of “expanded audio options” it looks like the model released outside the Japanese market will be sans MP3 playback capability – the only audio format on show at the San Fran demo being AAC formatted audio files.  Whether folks get all bitter and twisted about this announcement or not will be interesting.  Whether Nintendo simply change the capabilities to play MP3 by the release date is also yet to be discovered.  Count the later as likely however.

There were some upcoming 2008/2009 highlights for both DS and Wii announced by Fils-Aime as well.  Onto page 2 for these.