OK, if you're looking forward to the impending North American launch of the Nintendo DSi and you somehow made it past this story's headline and that big image there without absorbing the release facts Nintendo announced today, I've further rendered them in the following haiku.
Out on April 5,
One-hundred sixty-nine bucks.
Black and blue; where's white?
Indeed, there appears to be no white DSi launching in April. Instead we've got that new electric blue version on the way, along with the standard black one. (I'll go for black.) Amazon is taking preorders as we speak, while Destructoid reports that GameStop will begin accepting your delicious, interest-generating early money tomorrow.
I was a little ho-hum about getting a DSi, because the cameras don't really excite me and the merit of the downloadable games service will only be proven after the system comes out and we see what kind of software gets developed. But I'm suddenly really excited about the DSi's support for WPA wireless security, as opposed to the DS Lite's relatively limited support only for the utterly worthless, outdated WEP standard. A couple weeks ago, I dropped my wi-fi router into WEP mode to connect my DS Lite to it, and within 30 minutes some delightful soul in my neighborhood had cracked the WEP key and started leaching my bandwidth. So if you're way into playing the DS online, and you care about keeping unauthorized heathens off your network, the DSi almost seems like a no-brainer purchase.