Using borrowed wireless from a neighbors unsecured network, I discovered this morning that my Best Buy order was out for delivery.  There are few things that elicit that wonderful combination of satisfaction and excitement in a gadget fiend.

I got on with my day, ever mindful of the sounds upstairs, in case the customary Canada Post doorbell was eschewed in favour a more congenial knock.  By the time my cousin arrived for her daily peanut butter and honey on bread fix, there was still no sign of the postman.

I decided just to check the box, just in case in some crazy bizarro world it seemed like a good idea to shove a Best Buy box in our mailbox, and as sure as goose shit is slippery that’s exactly what the philistines at Canada Post had done.  My package was freezing out there in the damp and cold, with only a padded envelope to protect it from the elements!  I brought it in, sighed a relief that it appeared pretty dry on the outside.  I asked my cousin for a sharp knife, and proceeded opened her up.  The envelope, not my cousin.

Inside was the shiny new DSi that a couple Best Buy gift certificates had allowed me to indulge in.  Launching over the weekend, I hadn’t had time to see any unboxing photos montages online, so I dove in and was pretty awestruck but what I saw.

The beautiful matte cyan finish is incredibly striking.  Yes, the black would do nicely, but admittedly when someone sees this blue they’ll instantly know it’s a DSi, not a DS.  Oh fanboy vanity…

It’s a bit longer than the DS Lite, and considerably slimmer, but what you notice when you first open it up are the two great big beautiful screens.  Unfortunately when you turn it on, you notice the downside of the improvement: the artifacting of a screen running at a non-native resolution.  It’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on, but basically the text looks anti-aliased, but not anti-aliased enough…like when you stretch a pixel version of some text to 115% or something.  Will everyone notice this?  Probably not, as everything is readable and smooth - but for someone who works with type and resolutions day in and day out it was a bit jarring.

I spent the next ten minutes being taken through a profile building questionnaire - what was my first big gripe?  When you choose your UI colour theme there is no cyan blue that matches the DSi’s finish.  I settled for the complementary colour orange - which cleverly appears inside the SD slot and stylus compartment.  You put in a user name, greeting message, colour and birthday, putting in the date, time, country, language, etc. but you also snap your first picture.  Mine turned out pretty terrible but that had less to do with the DSi as my having a bad hair day.  I started the DSi Photo app and immediately found myself in a tutorial I wish I could’ve skipped.  It didn’t last long, but it didn’t move at the speed I wanted to.  It didn’t take too long to complete thankfully.  There are eleven different lenses to play with

• Normal
• Distortion (mesh warp)
• Graffiti (MS-paint with some stamps on your picture)
• Color (add selective colours to a black and white image - like the red bits in Schindler’s List)
• Colorpad (swap colors round)
• Mirror (vertical axis, kaleidoscope and square-kaleidoscope)
• Mischief (clever face recognition adds bunny ears, moustaches and sunglasses automatically to live images of faces)
• Emoter (again with the face recognition, this time altering the live image to convey different moods - smiley, angry and sad)
• Merge (morphs between two faces)
• Resemblance (in a picture with two faces it rates your similarities and determines if you’re related)
• Frames (add frames to your photos, apparently these can be customized and imported from SD)

The emoter, distortion and mirrors are absolutely great fun, the colour effects are a bit dodgy but the facial recognition is really pretty impressive.  You can switch between the outside and inside cameras very easily, and the DSi stores about 400 pictures internally or as many as you like on an SD/SDHC card.  Transferring is quick and easy, and you can transfer it both ways.

The cameras are cute and tucked away rather tastefully in the new design.  Due to Japanese and North American pervs alike, a light goes on when you’re taking a picture and a ‘click’ sound is made that you cannot turn off.  Thanks a lot hentai. That about wraps up the photo stuff.

The speakers sound fantastic, and that faux surround that was started with the DS Lite has evolved to a whole new level with this hardware revision.  Very convincing.  The D-Pad felt different to me, ‘clickier’ if that makes sense, and I immediately liked it.  All the buttons feel a bit different, slightly improved when I A/B test them to my DS Lite.

What was a potential deal-breaker for me was that power button.  Gone was that weird latch switch on the right hand side, and here was a proper little grey button to the left of the lower screen.  Wouldn’t I accidentally hit it or something?  I’m not sure how I worried about that, but let me reassure you if you had similar reservations - you’re not going to accidentally hit this thing.  The new power button is fine where it is, but more importantly it allows you to do a soft reset to the DSi Menu with a simple press, or a full Off if you hold it in.

The DSi interface is a very nice hybrid between what the Wii offers and what the original DS design team came up with.  I always loved that little GUI with its nice pixels and clickety sounds, and parts of it are still here.  Familiar sounds and even a look at the old clock and calendar when you go into DS Download Play mode.  PictoChat looks and behavesexactly the same as well.  The top screen has a photo displayed in it and the shoulder buttons offer quick access to the camera functionality.

The text is anti-aliased here, the backgrounds are Wii white and there’s an ambient soundtrack very reminiscent of the Wii UI.  Instead of the channel concept of accessing the different parts of the OS, there’s a horizontally scrollable block/container-based motif going on.  Raised white blocks have sharp little icons showing the DSi Camera, DSi Sound, DSi Shop and the aforementioned PictoChat and Download Play.  There’s plenty of room to the far right for new apps and games from the Shop as well.  The only two bits which aren’t container shaped are the first two - System Settings which will be extremely familiar for all Wii owners, and the DS cartridge shaped container for whatever game is currently in the DS slot.  Let’s all have the token moment of silence for the GBA slot - ye shall be missed.

The DSi Sound app is a lot of fun, but I am admittedly an audio nerd.  Top screen has an omnipresent oscilloscope monitoring your mic input, and you can record ten second audio ‘bubbles’ and organize them by colour with a standard Rec./Stop/Play interface.  The fun is in mixing it up - changing the speed and the pitch of your recorded voice with some half-decent formant filtering.  Then there’s the effects - parakeet, helium, tunnell, robot, harmonies, that kind of thing.  There’s even a series of really cool text-to-pitch filters, trumpet, whistle and ‘buzzer’ (a raw sounding synth).  These don’t work especially well, but they’re fun to play with.  I sang the Super Mario Bros. theme and the buzzer did a decent enough lo-fi NES job.  You can save your modified sounds and remodify them as many times as you like.  The little parakeet who is the mascot of this channel encourages you to get creative with backwards masking and all sorts of other things, though he does recommend you not swear too much because he actually squawks out your clips in his little parakeet voice occasionally.  You can play music too of course, and add effects, but unfortunately it only takes AAC files, so I didn’t get a chance to play around with that functionality.  Pay for the goddamned MP3 licensing already Nintendo.

I had to wait quite some time to get my network connection working, but that’s the joy of living in a broadband/wifi-less household.  When I did eventually connect, there was a license agreement to click next/agree to and a system update to be downloaded.  The DSi apparently supports WPA now, but not in DS games or something like that.  It was a pretty painless process setting up the network, with available options for advanced users which was nice to see.

Once I was online I connected to the DSi Shop and got an earful of its Wii-Shop-inspired background music.  So epic.  There’s not much in the store right now, a few games which are simply scaled down versions or minigames from commercial DS titles, a camera-intensive Warioware which is unfortunately being panned by critics, and what will hopefully be the first in a long line of Art Style games which make their way to the NA store.  If you’re not familiar with Art Style games, they’re gorgeous, minimalist gems being produced for the GBA/Wii/DS by the stylish geniuses at Skip (Chibi Robo, Captain Rainbow, etc).  They’re almost always a safe bet if you have some extra Nintendo Points burning a hole in your pocket.  The launch title offering is AQUITE, which is reviewed quite favourably.  I was surprised that there wasn’t more emphasis on multiplayer games, hopefully this changes soon - makes me wonder if you can stream live camera images smoothly over Nintendo DS local WiFi for some PictoVideoChat?

If you’re an ‘early adopter’, meaning you buy the DSi between now and October, you get 1000 free DSiWare points, which makes AQUITE pretty tempting, but I’m going to hold off.  I linked my club.nintendo.com account to my DSi, and discovered to my disappointment that despite the fact that Wii Points Cards are now Nintendo Points Cards, you can only redeem them for one system or the other.  I was hoping to be able to transfer some of my Wii Points over to my DSi, but sadly no dice.  Hopefully this gets fixed at some point, but since it’s not in the big N’s best interest it might never happen.

I downloaded the browser, and as one of the few saps who actually purchased the original Opera browser, I must say the improvement is spectacular.  It actually works now!  It’s a lot more like the Wii browser than the old clunker - I haven’t tested it extensively, but it’s definitely robust enough for my purposes and runs pretty quickly too.

So what’s the verdict?  I played some DS games and enjoyed the big, bright screens.  The DSi Photo and DSi Sound apps are great fun, and looking at what Japan has in their DSiWare store I’m pretty psyched about what’s on the horizon.  The browser is great, soft reset is included at last and the hardware feels ever-so-slightly tweaked and improved. My five beefs are pretty minor.

• Nintendo Points are either Wii or DSi - no cross-purchasing/transfers
• Text anti-aliasing looks a bit off on the larger screens
• UI colour theming not available to match either of the launch colours
• AAC format is just ridiculous - MP3s have been the standard for over a decade
• Without my gift cards, $199 wouldn’t have met my price point to features ratio