I have bought into Nintendo in a pretty big way over the last couple of years. I got the Nintendo DS lite a couple of years ago and loved it and we have moved over to the Wii from the PS2 with not many regrets ( just the loss of Singstar really). Nintendo seemed to have cottoned on to the huge market of casual gamers. We aren't going to stay up for 3 nights running to finish the new Tomb Raider or whatever the cool game is these days ( God I'm getting old!). We just want to have a bit of fun and not have to commit too much time, energy or money.

As Nintendo leeched money from me little by little with game after game that I couldn't resist, with the cherry on the top being an extra £70 for Wii Fit, I was beginning to think they had a web cam into my brain and knew exactly what gadgets and gizmo I craved. When I heard the news about the new DSi coming out in April I was pretty excited. What had they designed that I could crave and obsess over for a couple of months? Having a nose around on the web though ad finding out a bit more about it, I have to say my interest has slumped.

It's 12 percent thinner than the lite....so....hmmm. It has a built in camera which sounded great at first, despite having just bought a phone with a decent camera so can't really think why or where I would use it. Looking at the details further it seems to be a 1.3 Megapixel camera which is pretty pathetic by any standards. Nintendo defend this by extolling the virtues of being able to mess around with your pictures, draw funny moustaches on them and the like. I really can't think that this would keep anyone over the age of 10 interested for more than an hour.It has improved sound and mics but again seem to be there for you to have fun tweaking sounds that you record which doesn't appeal to me at all.

You can download games but I can do that on the Wii and never wanted to so. You can no longer use Game boy advance games with it and the battery life is 3-4 hours at brightest compared to 5-8 hours on the ds lite. It's £150 on release although game are offering it at £75 plus a trade in of your ds lite. I guess if you didn't have one at all and were deciding between paying £100 for the DS lite or £150 for the DSi then I might think about it differently but there's no way I'm trading up for as far as I can see very little extra benefit.