It’s the DSi on steroids, the portable console for the poorly sighted, for your grandparents, for anyone with big hands and big pockets. On sale in Japan for several months now, the Nintendo DSi XL has only just arrived on North American shores. Not so much a replacement, then, for the DSi as its chubbier sibling; check out the full SlashGear review after the cut.
Compared to the DSi’s 137 x 74.9 x 18.9 mm, the DSi XL measures in at 161 x 91.4 x 21.2 mm and, at 214g, weighs 100g more. All that extra chassis space is mainly dominated by the new screens; each measures 4.2-inches, with the lower panel being a touchscreen and the upper one a plain display. Sat side by side with the DSi the new handheld is perhaps a little brighter, but the main difference is that there’s no squinting involved any more. The sort of older – perhaps glasses wearing – gamers that Nintendo are partially targeting the DSi XL at should find it far easier to read text and make out smaller icons.
In fact, the only downside to the new displays comes by virtue of Nintendo doing nothing to increase resolution. Just like the DSi before it, each DSi XL panel runs at 256 x 192, and while that might be sufficient for 3.25-inches, blown up to 4.2-inches and you start to notice blockiness. We’re guessing this is to maintain compatibility, but we’d have loved to have seen higher resolution screens for DSi XL specific titles.
In comparison to the bigger chassis and the bigger displays, the DSi XL’s controls are pretty much unchanged from the DSi. That includes the D-pad and buttons, together with the shoulder triggers, and even the slot-in stylus is the same as on the smaller handheld. As before, the controls are highly clicky, but we found that after some heavy duty play they started to loosen up a little. Nintendo also throw a second stylus into the box, this one looking more like a regular pen than the narrow stick that actually stows into the handheld. There’s a lanyard loop at the end, but what looks like a pocket-clip is, bizarrely, simply a ridge of plastic.