Wow, um, wow..I guess I'm the only one who plays GBA games on his GCN? lawl, I plan on getting the DSi, well, because I need a new DS and a new MP3 player.

I could careless about battery life because I never play my DS longer than a few hours at a time and I never played GBA games on my DS.

I didnt know about the GBA slot loss, thats bad, so I guess I would buy a DS lite if I had to buy one.

I said the thing about the psp since I have a psp and play it ften and the battery life is enought for me even in long trips, so I dont see it as a big problem.

this is probably gonna make me wait a while to get the dsi, holding out to see if they ever release a model with longer battery life.

What is the actual estimated times of life for both consoles, and on all the brightness settings?

(I think DSlite has 4 settings right? and DSi has 5?)

 Most people like to play handheld games on the go. It is a fairly large portion of the appeal. Being able to play them on a big screen TV at home is not a replacement for being able to play them while bored waiting for my next class to start.

 @Vlad
 This is all pretty old news. The info on the lower battery life was part of the original announcement. I can't understand why these new model handheld can't keep up with the battery life of the "inferior" models but some mysteries can never be solved I suppose.

Its not that much of a battery life drop - its still way above the PSP for instance.

I almost always play on the lowest (or 2nd lowest) brightness setting, and usually without networking - and the DSi will have almost an identical battery life to the DS in this case.

Being able to download, store games, and have them available AFTER I turn my DS off is a much more welcome feature IMO.

Big surprise: more features require more power leading to shorter play time.

Call it PSP deja vu, but if it's really a big issue, buy another battery.

Better sound, better screen; not a bad trade off not even factoring the other hardware additions.

On the other hand, deleting the GBA slot is kind of a breaker if you have a lot of carts, not that I had immediate intentions of buying a DSi anyway. GBA is a dying/dead platform anyway.

I presume the real reason for deleting the slot is so that Nintendo can begin selling old GBA games through the Nintendo Shopping Channel, just like the PSP/PSN Store.

 Your solution to a portable systems low battery life is to have it take up even more space? Thats the worst solution ever. Portable players are supposed to be compact and easy to carry around. Thats the appeal of them infact. Adding more hardware rips that right away. If the upgraded features are draining more battery power then put in a better battery plain and simple. The DS lite has a number of improvements over the original DS and still has a better battery life.

So you're saying that the DSi that you designed and manufactured is better than Nintendo's.

Okay. Then you clearly don't need to buy one.

For anyone else still buying one that have a legitimate issue with the power management, just buy an aftermarket battery with a higher mAh rating (this is literally the same retread argument that took place over the PSP-3000).

Anyway, I'm under the impression that most people already have a DSL anyway, but then people seems to collect them in multiples for whatever reason. It's not like the DSi plays different games (until they start being distributed through the Nintendo Shopping Channel).

Seconds Shams, here. DSware is not something I can easily turn away from.