Nintendo DSi floods Japanese market

What happens when your precious homebrew crashes every 2 minutes, and needs constant releases of bug fixes, etc?

Nintendo is smart. They're not about to bother developing software they're gonna end up coming up short with. It's one thing to have some Homebrew that doesn't work perfectly, but if you purchase a $170 peice of hardware and it starts malfunctioning, Nintendo would have a riot of angry purchasers with flames and pitchforks at their HQ!

I doubt it's beyond Nintendos money and knowledge to have their built-in music player play MP3s and possibly videos.

They just cheaped out cause they have to pay to use those formats.

I'm not asking for an organizer, I'm asking for the obvious with stuff they already have in the system.

I'm glad the DSi doesn't support MP3. It's an aging lossy format that asks for ridiculous amounts of royalties to keep itself fed. Customers, artists and publishers are far better off with different formats, to the tunes of millions of dollars.

Not to mention the fact that Nintendo hasn't made hardware to compete with even the most basic bottom-of-the-barrel cheap mp3 player on sound quality. Its main advantages are in doing things other portable devices commonly don't. I'm more than glad it's not competing with DAPs and PMPs. There's enough of those everywhere you turn. As time goes on, better technology and better formats (and truly free formats) should be promoted, not ignored. That is progress.

Jeez, and all this time I've been listening to MP3's and enjoying music and I didn't know that it was actually a terrible format!

aj,
Nice sarcasm. Didn't say it was bad, merely that there IS better now, all to the tune of millions in savings and better sound for same or reduced bitrates. Some call it progress and some others call it making a decent profit without feeding the companies that like to offer mp3 to the masses 'free' to drive demand while having everyone else pay through the nose for it to stream or implement it in hardware.
http://www.mp3licensing.com

Nearly all games released now on PC use Ogg Vorbis, for instance. AAC is used for similar reasons.

PS. fact remains Nintendo still wouldn't know sound quality if it hit them in the arse, so all this is pretty pointless on the technical merit angle. On the cost angle, things become very very relevant to a company such as Nintendo and I don't blame them one bit, nor do I want MP3 support in their... *gasp* gaming device.

MP3s really only suck below 192 kbps bitrate. I've read about tests by audiophiles who can't distinguish between 320 kbps MP3s (with high quality encoding, like LAME) and lossless formats.

For my part, I'm 100% content with Amazon's 256 kbps, DRM-free MP3s. What makes the format good is that everything except for the DSi supports it. No transcoding, it just works.

Don't blame Nintendo Japan, maybe Nintendo North America needs to get rid of all it's existing stock of DS Lites.

In any case, Japan always gets things first. Be thankful you live in the U.S. North America tends to get stuff before Europe and the rest of the world.

Who says the reception in Japan in general was not positive?


A successful release involves:
1) a successful marketing strategy, with enough time to plan and implement them for America and also the rest of the world.
2) making sure they can keep shelves stocked, otherwise any marketing money they spent to stimulate demand is wasted.


* A staggered worldwide release means any little bugs and issues can be ironed out on their home turf before going full-scale
* Manufacturing efficiencies will be improved as time goes on, no doubt contributing to the ability to manufacture many in quantity to meet worldwide demand, and no doubt contributing to higher profit for Nintendo when released overseas through reduced component costs
* Nintendo perhaps need to reduce stocks of current units in the channel, too.
* the device needs to be approved for use in many different countries, including USA

It's not all bad to have to wait, and there are some valid reasons why it's not always possible to successfully release a product worldwide (or in the USA) from the start. Very few products are released like that anyway.