3DS buffet

[A Black Falcon]

Wow... Wow.... That's... expensive. Really, $250? That's most certainly the most expensive system Nintendo's ever sold, and it's a portable. Granted, it appears this is a very powerful system, but it's in the range of the Wii, not the 360, so it's a little shocking. The 3D screen could also play a part there, as would miniaturization, but still, that's a lot. Considering the battery power is the lowest of any of Nintendo's portables (about 2-5 hours), what I'm getting from this is a total reversal of Nintendo's own long-standing policies for portable systems (that is, they should be cheap, and energy efficient). It's coming out in a few months anyway. They've already "run through" the current production of DS-i systems, and don't intend to make any more (that thing really did just end up being a stop-gap system).

You're right, in terms of power, battery life, and price, I agree that the 3DS is a reversal of almost all precedent for Nintendo portables. The whole concept from the beginning was cheap, low power, and long battery life, with lots of good games. Now only the last of those is there. Will this be a problem? Well, likely not in the end, but the price will probably slow adaptation, yes, compared to if it was cheaper like previous Nintendo handhelds. On the other hand, rumors had put the price at perhaps as much as $300, so at least it's cheaper than it could have been.

As for the battery life, it's quite unfortunate, but it's probably just a result of the fact that battery technology hasn't nearly kept pace with computer power. Battery technology doesn't have anything like Moore's Law constantly pushing advances forward. Perhaps there'll be some big advance in batteries in the future, but we don't have it now.

On that note, if the PSP 2 is anywhere near as powerful as rumored -- that is, much more powerful than 3DS -- and the current PSP and PSP Go get battery life around what the 3DS will, I have to really wonder how awful that thing's battery life will be...

Oh yeah, and at least these systems have rechargeable batteries. Even the Lynx and Nomad, with their perhaps 2 or 3 hour battery lives on 6 AAs (2-3 or 3-4 or something for Lynx model 1 and 5-6 for model 2, or something like that?), or the Game Gear with 6-7 hours on 6 AAs, wouldn't be nearly as bad if they were rechargeable, with modern rechargeable battery technology. Of course that battery tech was too expensive or didn't exist back then (that at least has improved), but really, the problem with those systems was as much the cost of having to constantly buy batteries as it was the very short battery life.

(The original brick Game Boy, for the record, has the best battery life of any Nintendo handheld at (35-)40 hours on 4 AAs.)