Speaking to North American press in San Francisco this morning, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime said that the camera-toting, music-playing DSi won't be coming to our shores for quite some time.
Fils-Aime said they wouldn't be bringing the DSi to North America until late 2009 because they want to continue selling the DS throughout the holiday season.
@apujanata, I figured out what happened. People originally saw the Tokyo press event first and there was mistranslations of what was said on the English gaming news sites that said that both screens were touch screens.
However, they all figured out that they had mistranslated what had happened at the Tokyo conference after attending the San Francisco conference.
For example, IGN originally reported that there were dual touch screens, but they then modified their report with this statement: "We originally translated that DSi's screens were both touch compatible, but that is reportedly incorrect."
So as the DSi is not an entirely new platform but merely a confirmed DS Lite-style upgrade, I imagine that it will be included in the sales that this GLS represents.
@lstormy10, I remember reading in NeoGAF forum about 2 Touch screen confirmation. But it seems that in the referenced liveblog, there is no mention of it. Possibilities : - Liveblog didn't capture the 2 touch screen feature - Some forum poster erroneously convert the "rumor of 2 Touch screen" into "confirmed 2 Touch Screen". - I have a hazy/faulty memory.
@deftangel, @kspraydad, @mrahaju, Where did Nintendo say that it has dual touch screens? Because I can't find anywhere where they said that.
Also, as the DSi is still of the original breed of DS (like the DS Lite was), we now know that the DS family of hardware will last until at least past March 2010 due to the free points that each purchaser of the DSi receives being good until then.
DS games won't take nearly as long to develop as that. If the internal hardware specs aren't all that different and the dual touch screen is made accessible by an extension of the API then we'll see dual touch screen games very soon.
There won't be a shedload of course because of the existing DS userbase vs the DSi userbase but many games will be able to offer two modes.
@kspraydad, Time to short DS GLS ? I personally believe that no game will utilize those 2 touch screen feature in 2009. It could happen in 2010, but maybe only 10% of all game released in that year. In addition to the fact that game development take time, there is also a factor that not all game released in 2008 utilize DS touch screen.
4