The DSi shows where Nintendo is heading with their DS handheld brand. Where does Nintendo want to take us?

It’s one part a gaming handheld that’s going to be capable of “a bit” more than just games: internet; an office suite (where you are going to use the bottom screen as a virtual keyboard), camera + after effect software, music player (there is a lot of unused space to the left and right of the top screen that can be used for serious speakers); camera chat software or an avatar community (where your avatar mimics your facial expressions thanks to the camera); camera in conjunction with infrared LED’s to allow for Wii like spatial awarness of the stylus (and if you’re painting in 3D and using a shoulderbutton to activate/deactivate drawing lines with the stylus, it might be a good idea to make the shoulderbuttons pressure-sensitive this time around so that you have more realtime control over how thick / thin the line is). etc. etc.

And it’s one part the ultimate device for playing games: accelerometer; gyroscope; multi-touch screens (debatable if Nintendo is going to make the upper screen multi-touch as well, or if they in true Nintendo fashion will be cutting corners here and make it “singel-touch”); camera for eyetoy like games and–since the camera is so close to the user–for registering eye movement or any facial expression for that matter; Wii like spatial awarness for.. a more physical aspect to games, or a more spatial aspect at least (EBA, Trauma Center, table tennis, whatever).

But for all this to be possible in the best way, the DS2 has to have at least gamecube like hardware; and it has to have a lot better screens than the DSi.

Lack of horsepower is the reason why there’s no “DSiWii”; or it has to be, because think about it. The DS handheld is a clamshell design. Which means that Nintendo would have been able to put one infrared LED above the top screen and one infrared LED underneath the bottom screen, and the camera that’s already situated on the hinge could act as a third infrared detecting source. This would allow for accurate triangulation, and since a DS already uses a stylus, it wouldn’t be difficult to add an ir LED to it (or maybe two, one on each end so that the LED’s would be able to calculate whether or not the user twisted the stylus around a specific point or not, as well).

LED’s are cheap; so it can’t be the manufacturing cost, it has to be the lack of horsepower; unfortunate, but then again, this isn’t a DS2 this is “just” a newer version of the DS lite.

EDIT: realised that one of the reasons why Wii like capabilities could prove difficult to implement is because the user can manually adjust the angle of the upper screen in relation to the bottom screen. Of course, this problem might be possible to circumvent if it was possible to make the hardware aware of somehow at what angle the user had opened the handheld (maybe the accelerometer/-s could come to use here or gyroscope.. although a gyroscope might be scratched from the DS2 since there’s really no use for a gyroscope on a handheld when you have an accelerometer). Anyways, yeah, maybe an accelerometer could prove helpful here, maybe not, but I don’t think that the solution would be that expensive at least.