Pictures Of Nintendo DSi Prototype – How Accurate Were They?

Since 2006, immediately after the release of the Nintendo Wii, pictures of Nintendo DSi prototype started to leak on the internet.  The first set of pictures of Nintendo DSi prototype validated speculations back then that Nintendo was developing an upgrade to the Nintendo DS Lite.  Many believed that Nintendo deemed such an upgrade as necessary to improve the interconnection between the DS, which was to be the DSi, and the Wii.  The DS’ competitor, the Sony PSP, after all, can perfectly synch itself with the Sony PS3.

The succeeding months saw the leakage of even more pictures of Nintendo DSi prototype.

With the recent release of the real Nintendo DSi, we can now determine how accurate these pictures of Nintendo DSi prototypes really were.

For example, pictures of Nintendo DSi prototypes revealed that the DSi was originally meant to have 2 card slots – one for the SD game and another for the Gameboy cartridge.  This, of course, would’ve made the DSi similar to previous DS models.  The design was nixed in the final release because the prototype would’ve made the finished product bulkier than the previous incarnations.  Necessary sacrifices were made – backwards compatibility, incompatibility with add-on for the first Guitar Hero on Tour, and incompatibility with the DS Rumble Pack.  But the end result is a sleeker, sexier Nintendo DSi.

Pictures of the Nintendo DSi prototype also revealed wider screens for the unit.  This, however, was proven to be a mere rumor as the sizes for the dual screens were always planned to remain untouched.

Pictures of the Nintendo DSi prototype also didn’t include the SD card slot as an external storage option.  The final product, as we all know, has this SD card slot which, as Nintendo itself has indicated, will play a crucial role for many software applications to be released in the future.  The developers deemed the SD card slot to be necessary because of the new data that the DSi can process.  The camera feature, for example, is expected to capture a lot of photos, data which may eventually become too big for the internal memory of the DSi to store.

Now here’s something amusing: pictures of Nintendo DSi prototypes likewise showed the unit to have just one camera.  The camera was rumored to be rotatable so that the user doesn’t have to turn the DSi front and back just to take the pictures he wants to capture.  The finished product turned out to have 2 cameras to avoid this problem.  Having 2 cameras also added more functionality for the DSi, as internet video conferencing is now very much possible, what with the improved WiFi feature as well.

Pictures of Nintendo DSi prototypes turned out to be mostly inaccurate.  However, the finished product turned out to be a thousand times better than what many people have expected.  All’s well that ends well in the land the Mario built.