A look at Nintendo's DSi

Nintendo has already sold 100 million DS and DS Lites.

Is there really much of a market out there for more of these handheld wonders? The new DSi, which went on sale Sunday for $170, is about to find out.

The hardware comes with slightly bigger screens, two cameras, a download store, the ability to store games on an SD card, and the ability to edit and manipulate photos and music. The result is a more robust platform that can play new camera-based games and can offer smaller and more-inventive games through the DSi Shop.

Let's start with the cameras. You can take a picture of yourself using a bunch of funky lenses. Think of those fun photo booths in Asia.

You can stretch faces, add graffiti, tweak the color, apply silly frames or morph two faces into one. You can do most of the effects after the fact through an editor. This is the kind of fun that a kid could spend hours on. It doesn't get old.

But the cameras also work in gameplay. One of the DSi Shop games - WarioWare: Snapped - uses the cameras as a way to control onscreen movements. You move about, change your hand positions and shake your head to win points. At the end, the game replays a video of you doing all your movements, which look ridiculous when viewed apart from the game. The iPhone might have an accelerometer but the cameras on the DSi can open a whole host of gaming options.

There's also a music player so you can play music off of an SD card. But the cool thing is you can also distort your own sounds clips you've recorded or you can manipulate the music from your collection.

The DSi Shop is one of the other major additions. Late last week, there were a couple of older DS and Game Boy Advance titles mixed with some new games and a free browser.

But this will soon be a place to download a lot of cheap and free iPhone-like games that can pull off some real innovation. You can just download the games over Wi-Fi to your DSi or SD Card. To entice people, Nintendo is giving away 1,000 free DSi points.

Quibbles? The battery life isn't as good as the DS Lite, the browser is slow and there is no slot for old Game Boy Advance games. But with this collection of improvements and the ability to download games, Nintendo is on its way to selling 150 million DS systems.