Opinion: What Nintendo should have included in the DSi

The dust has barely settled from Nintendo's announcement of the shiny new DSi and while for the most part the machine appears to be a solid enhancement of its original dual-screen wonder, there will predictably be some of us (mainly vocal forum dwellers) who don't see it as going quite far enough.

Okay, so a new machine that makes you coffee in the morning and suggests which shirt looks best with which tie was probably a bit much to ask (we can dream, can we not?), but after much deliberation we've nevertheless come up a list of (slightly more reasonable) tricks Nintendo has missed with DSi.

Hard Drive
The introduction of an SD card slot is a welcome one but, like a spoilt kid at Christmas, we always want more.

An internal hard drive of some description would have offered almost limitless possibilities; games could make use of the additional storage space as RAM to offer enhanced visuals and sound, for example. As it stands the SD solution is a neat one that fits in perfectly with the portable ethos of the DSi (and makes it less open to piracy, too), but the fact PSP owners are constantly bemoaning the lack of a hard drive in their console (despite the fact that it already supports Memory Stick media) should have spoken volumes to Nintendo.

Dual touchscreens
We've lost count of the number of times we've passed our beloved DS to a non-gamer and watched them furiously poke the upper DS display thinking that, like the lower one, it is also imbued with touchscreen capabilities.

To be honest, such a feature is long overdue. It certainly strikes us as a fairly logical progression – the old DS only has one touchscreen, so surely granting the same functionality to the other display would improve matters?

Accessing in-game menus would be made even easier as they could be positioned on the top display, removing the need to skip through various status screens using the bottom one. However, games that supported such a feature would naturally have to be re-tooled to function on the DS Phat and DS Lite, and despite the constant flow of wallet-harming hardware updates Nintendo isn't quite brazen enough to entirely freeze-out current DS owners.

Integration with the Virtual Console service
Details are pretty light on the ground at present but what we do know is that the DSi will have downloadable content of some description. The question is, will it have its own online store or will Nintendo attempt to integrate it with the Wii's extraordinarily successful Virtual Console portal?

With hundreds of classic Mega Drive, NES, N64, SNES, PC Engine and Neo-Geo games currently available the Virtual Console is a goldmine for retro enthusiasts, and the ability to play these games on the move would surely make the DSi an near-essential upgrade.

A better design
Be honest – when you laid eyes on the DSi one of the first things that raced through your mind (along with "Please have mercy on my poor bank account, Nintendo") was "It doesn't look very different, does it?"

As far as redesigns go this is a pretty subtle one and isn't anywhere near as drastic as the jump from the chunky DS Phat to slender DS Lite. You could argue that the sleek lines of the Lite don't need any further modification but there's no question that a slightly different casing would have made this a bit more desirable to those of us that aren't entirely convinced by the machine's other enrichments.

Better cameras
The two cameras on the DSi each boast a weedy resolution of just 0.3 megapixels, which is roughly what your first camera phone had (you know, the one you've since palmed off to an elderly relative) – hardly what you could call cutting edge technology.

While the possibilities offered by these twin cameras is intoxicating (web chat, applications within games, control via camera movement, etc) it would have been even more impressive if Nintendo could have given us a megapixel count of five or above; then the DSi would be the very spirit of convergence – you could leave your traditional 'point and shoot' snapper at home and just take your handheld console out on family sightseeing trips instead. At least then you could indulge in some gaming when you become bored with your tiresome relatives.

Motion control
With the Wii having paved the way for motion-sensitive gaming we seriously expected any new Nintendo machine to include such a feature almost by default. Sure, we've seen some GBA titles include accelerometers in the past but actually building it into the hardware would have been a canny move on Nintendo's part.

Alas, as we pointed out with the dual touchscreens, such a move would alienate those gamers not flush enough to upgrade to the DSi and this is probably why such a groundbreaking feature wasn't considered. We'll gladly put money on the next Nintendo handheld boasting such innovation, though. But presumably only when the technology becomes ultra-cheap – the other obvious reason for its absence in the DSi is clearly financial.

So that completes our current wishlist. Do you have any features you really wanted to see incorporated into the DSi? Well don't keep them to yourselves, you greedy lot – post them in the comments section, why don't you?