Topic: Reasons to own a DSi? Well list 'em!

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Ok, everyone on the fence about a DSi or anyone just unsure about it's worth, I'm about to make your decision easier with an in-depth explaination as to why you should own this, starting with the obvious.

The Cameras:
The DSi features two .3 megapixel cameras. one on the outer shell of the system and one inside on the hinge. Although .3 megapixels may sound like extremely poor quality, It's really not bad. I will admit that unless you have good lighting the pictures will look like crap but with proper lighting, pictures come out looking very nice. Of course the camera isn't just a camera. The DSi features 9 lenses (things to do with the pictures). The first and my personal favorite is the distortion lens. This lens allows you to stretch a picture out with the stylus or play with the size of different parts of the picture. You can even play with this lens in real time. For example, you can have the inner cam actively watching you as you stretch your face around. If you get something you like, you can save that picture with the distortion attached. This lens is extremely fun to fiddle with and always the first thing I show people when I showcase the DSi. The next leans is the graffiti lens. Simply put, this lens allows you to doodle on a picture however you see fit with 5 colors and 3 sizes of pen, plus a rainbow pen. You can also take a "sample" of color from the picture and use that as a pen color if the 5 colors don't suit you. There are also a selection of 10 stamps to use in this lens. Examples of these would be hearts, music notes, paw prints, etc. This lens is also great fun as you can get very creative with it. The next lens is the color lens. What this lens does is changes the picture to black and white and allows you to touch the places you want color. For example, if you took a picture of a red apple, strawberries, a banana, and a lime, then touched the red apple, only it and the strawberries would bear color while the rest of the picture stays black and white. This lens works for the most part but it seems to group red things and skin tone into the same catagory. Still a fun lens though. The next lens is the Colorpad lens. This lens is similar to the comor lens. If we use my above example of a picture of various fruits, in this lens if you touch the lime, it and only it would change to a random different color because it's the only green thing in the picture. If your not satisfied with it's color, keep touching it until you are. The next lens is the mirror lens. Honestly it should have been called the kalidescope lens (did I spell that right?). It essentially takes a picture and makes it look like it's in a kelidescope. Honestly, it's not terribly interesting but it's ok. The mischief lens is next. What this lens does is sekk out the eyes, nose, and mouth on a human face and puts various silly things in the appropriate places. There are 10 things to choose from which the DSi automatically places in the right spot on the picture. Some examples are: a moustache, years, big eyes, a pig nose, etc. The face sensing works moderately well and is a pleasure to play with. The next lens is the emoter lens. This lens while simple, can be a blast to play with. You basically get 3 buttons for happy, angry, and sad emotions. The DSi again recognizes a human face then alters it to the emotion you chose. The results of this lens can be very funny and entertaining. The next lens is the merge lens. This lens essentially lets you fuse 2 faces together. It doesn't simply overlay 2 transparent images though. It again scopes out a face in each picture and fuses things together lined up with each other. This is another great lens and one of my favorites. The final lens is the resemblance lens. This lens takes 2 human faces in the same picture, compares them, and gives you a percentage as to how alike the faces are. This lens works pretty well and is fun to experiment with. Those are all the lenses the DSi offers. There is obviously a wide variety and they're all enjoyable in their own right. 2 "lenses" I left out are only available while actually taking a picture. The first is the normal lens which just takes pictures. The other is the frame lens. This lets you take a picture of, say, a hat. you can then carve around that picture to just leave the hat. you can then put the hat on the screen while taking a picture to make it look like the subject of the picture is wearing the hat. It takes some work but the results can be really awesome. The camera also has access to facebbok allowing you to post a picture to facebook directly from the DSi. It's a nice, convinient feature. A few other little things to rap up the camera, you can share pictures with friends wirelessly. You can save pictures to the system or SD card. You can also chose a picture from the system memory to display on the home menu. I know the arguement against the DSi Camera is that everyone has a better quality camera. While that may be true, your high quality camera can't do all of what is listed above. trust me, the DSi Camera is a very fun application that can easily steal a few hours from you. That about covers the DSi camera and all of what it can do.

Nintendo DSi Sound:
DSi Sound is actually broken into two parts: Recording sound and listening to music. Let's start with recording sound. You are presented with 18 spots where you can record clips up to 10 seconds long each. You can then take your recorded clip and play with it with a couple different options. The first option is changing the speed and pitch of the sound. This is done on an easy to understand grid of sorts where the x axis dictates speed and the y axis dictates pitch. You can also play the sound backwards. You are also given a list of four options to further tweak the sound. These are, a bird voice, sounding like you're talking into a fan, a harmony of people, and a trumpet. It can be more fun than it seems to sit there and play with a sound or with your voice. That's about all there is to sound recording. It's admittedly a little shallow but it's still very fun to play with it. The second part of DSi Sound is of course, listening to music. This option allows you to play digital music files from SD card. the catch is the it doesn't support mp3s. Insted it supports aac files. While it is an annoyance it really isn't that bad because iTunes can quickly and easily change an mp3 into an aac and iTunes is a free download from apple's website. once you have music in the system, you can do many things with it. You have three main options. the first is the same speed/pich graph seen in the voice recording section. the second is a group of four options to tweak the song. These are, making the song sound like a radio, cut out vocals, make an echo over the music, and change the song into an 8-bit style song. These option work fine except for the 8-bit one. To be honest, almost any song put through the 8-bit filter sounds like a complete mess. the third main option let's you play sounds that you may have recorded together with the song. There are also a handful of visualizeers for your music. Examples include excitebike, Mario bros. a rolling snowball, etc. The music playing portion of the DSi falls under a similar criticism as the camera. Everyone has an Mp3 player. While that is true, just like the camera, you don't have an Mp3 player that can quite do what this does. That about does it for Nintendo DSi Sound.

Nintendo DSi Browser:
This is an edition of the DS Browser specially made for the DSi. It's fairly bare-bones but hey, it works. It's just fine for things like blogging, chacking email, etc. but slows to a crawl on flash heavy sites. It also doesn't really have a flash player to speak of so no youtube (for now). It's similar to the Wii Browser in presentation just not quite as fast. That about says it all for the DSi Browser. simple, and it works.

Flipnote Studio:
Here's a big one. I'm not gonna ramble on this one because I'm sure you've heard of Flipnote Studio's awesomeness. Let me just say this thing is packed with features complete with online options and is simply a blast to play with. This is almost reason enough on it's own to get a DSi. If you want more information, check out Corbie's review here: http://dsiware.nintendolife.com/reviews/2009/08/flipnote_stud...

DSiWare:
Here's the big one. DSi exclusive games. For anyone who doesn't know, DSiWare is Nintendo's downloadable games and applications service for the DSi. As much as people criticize DSiWare for a lack of quality, I can give a list of alot of really great games that you simply can't get on a DS lite:
-Art Style: AQUIA
-Art Style: BASE 10
-Art Style: PiCTOBiTS
-Art Style: ZENGAGE
-Art Style: BOXLIFE
-Art Style: precipice
-Mario vs DK 3
-Pop Plus Solo
-Mighty Flip Champs
-Asphalt 4: Elite Racing
-Dr. Mario Express
-Brain Age: Math
-Brain Age: Art and Letters
-Bird and Beans
-Paper Airplane Chase
And that's not even all of the good games on offer. DSiWare really does have quite a few great games for it. Not to mention the emense potential of DSiWare. Many useful apps will start to come out for the system and a DSi VC is inevitable. The DSi Shop is already great but it's potential is even greater.

Other Things:
the DSi has slightly bigger screens compared to the lite. It has a brighter screen. it has upgradable firmware. It has a much higher max volume. It has a wonderful matte finish as opposed to the fingerprint magnet gloss finish of the lite.

I believe everything listed above more than warrants a purchase of a DSi for those with a DS lite, DS phat, or no DS at all. As much as people like to talk the DSi down, it really does have a nice line up of features and is a significant improvement over the lite. Just get it.