Do We Really Need a New Nintendo DS?

Do we need another version of the Nintendo DS that isn't just a lipstick-colored eye-catcher wrapped around the same-ol-same-ol hardware? How about the ability to play back music and movies either via increased local storage, wireless streaming, or perhaps even both, along with a new slot for external hardware plugins? The wireless streaming bit's my own speculation, but the original rumor about media playback and the plugin slot was started by Hirokazu Hamamura of magazine publisher Enterbrain. Last week you maybe read about a "new and improved" Nintendo DS showing up at E3 in July? That was these guys.

How credible is Hamamura's claim? No one knows. We on the one hand have Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime stirring up hype like "All I can tell you is what we announce during E3 is gonna be fantastic." On the other, we have the fact that Nintendo last updated the DS in 2006--two years after the original in 2004--along with Nintendo's history of updating its portables at two year intervals back and through its GameBoy line. With Apple's iPhone hypothetically vying for handheld gamers' coin and Sony's PlayStation Portable in the ascendant (it's actually outselling the DS in Japan) 2008 certainly wouldn't be too soon for Nintendo to give it's gaming mainstay a booster shot.

The current Nintendo DS dubbed the "DS Lite" and true to its name (smaller, cute as a button, etc.) but functionally identical to the original DS, set the handheld world ablaze. Since 2004, it's sold around 70 million units worldwide, making it the second bestselling platform going after Sony's PlayStation 2.

You could certainly make the existing DS Lite "lighter," but I doubt anyone would notice, and it's possible to make something like this too light. People associate a certain amount of heft with quality, and the DS Lite already feels a little flimsy and breakable to me -- especially around the hinges -- compared to the PSP.

The question, then, is whether anyone's really going to care if they can use their DS as an audio-video playback device. Most of you with audio needs have miniscule iPods (my Shuffle's the size of a postage stamp), don't particularly care to watch movies on tiny 2-3 inch screens that run any longer than a YouTube clip, and by the way, didn't we already see portable movie playback fail with Sony's attempt to put movies on UMD discs? Let's get serious. It's been possible for years to load movies on PSP memory sticks, but I don't know anyone who does it regularly. I'll be on a plane to Budapest come Wednesday toting both my DS and PSP, but even in economy class the airlines make it so easy to watch dozens of the latest movies and TV shows on the backs of the seat in front of you that squinting at a handheld electronic device for hours at a time sounds about as appealing as having my eyeballs massaged with a leather strop.

Now what would be interesting? Let's shoot the moon: A power boost, something that would let the DS compete directly with the PSP in raw horsepower. And how about a resolution bump for seconds? The current DS has two screens running at a mediocre 256 x 192 pixels. The PSP's single widescreen runs 480 x 272 pixels at up to 16.7 million colors. Wouldn't it be something if Nintendo released a "DS Advance" with two PSP-like screens and the processing oomph to deliver a game as complex as The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess in your pocket?