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Okay. It's about time I did a DSi review, hmm? Let me get on with it. This is going to be a microreview like many of the ones DotEd has done, except his epic video. I'm going to tackle the menus. I'm not as fortunate as DotEd to have a video camera, and you all would probably be laughing at my accent more than paying attention to what I have to say about whatever I'm reviewing in a video anyway. This is perhaps more safer for me and you. Some of the mods have heard my voice and can provide testimony to my claims. If I were doing a video it might be easier to show everything off, but since I'm having to do everything by the way of prose I'll need some translations done; my magical translation wand as you can see already is being used in this case.

When you first start up the DSi it's quite a bit different than what we're used to with the regular ol' DS or DS Lite. They have it set up similarly to how the Wii is set up with different channels for you to place downloaded content in, such as demos or the amazing Opera browser that can be downloaded for it. The menu is about as simple as it gets to navigate. You go left or right through the items, pick what you want, and move on. You press up on the d-pad and the menu item will move out of the queue where you can rearrange it any way you like by using the d-pad to go left or right and pressing down to place it in a new location. Really simple and intuitive.

I'm going to focus a bit on the preferences menus; it was the first thing I really had to deal with when I started using the DSi because I needed to get it on my Wi-Fi network. I use WPA and not WEP for wireless internet encryption. Espen left Ed and I some directions to set up Wi-Fi on the DSi because we don't understand Japanese. It didn't work for me. It doesn't appear to even be obvious in English how to set up Wi-Fi using WPA.

When you get to the setup screen you'll see 3 different networks you can specify, but all three of these can only be used when the connection is unencrypted or encrypted with WEP. You're left scratching your head asking, "Okay. My DS Lite has no trouble connecting. Why does this?" There's a button close to the bottom of the screen when translated means "advanced settings" that sends you to another one with three more network slots. While not instantly obvious you're allowed to select what encryption your network uses on these three only. I guess that's what it means by "advanced settings". On further note, why should the little thing even care what encryption is being used? The router broadcasts what encryption method it uses. The device should ask for the appropriate type of password for the encryption method the router broadcasts. Most people aren't going to know what WEP or WPA is. It just seems to be really un-Nintendo. They're usually as anal as Apple is typically about menu choices and the obviousness of such. This doesn't even make sense when translated.

Overall my experiences navigating the DSi have been pleasant despite everything's being in Japanese. In my opinion the wi-fi setup menus need quite a bit of work to be intuitive for most people.