The DS Lite - Lateral Thinking's Prime Example

This is more of a opinions thing rather than a software or hardware based thing, but there's something I've had in my head about the DS for a long while, and now finally owning a Lite I can say for certain:

(Wikimedia Commons)

This thing just wasn't meant to be it since the start.

The DS phat was a bulky huge console with the same screen size as the smaller Lite, but you can clearly see the technological limitations of 2004 at play here. The same thing that would later happen with the PSP and it's way of getting thinner, Nintendo used that technology to deliver a superior product that was on the Lite.

And this wasn't the first time such a feat had been done by Nintendo.

Source

The GBA SP was clearly the way Nintendo wanted everyone to use the Gameboy. A frontlight or maybe backlight if you were lucky, a vertical design, a clamshell, a more visually appealing... appearance.

This all reminds me of Yokoi's "枯れた技術の水平思考" or "Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology", because although these consoles were fairly bleeding edge at their times, their definitive version only applied later on as technology developed. The same can be said about newer Nintendo consoles.

The Mini shrunk the Wii, the New 3DS/XL made a superior product at a similar price range, the Wii U... nevermind, the Switch got the Lite and the OLED and I'm willing to guess we might see more of it.

I've felt this has been Nintendo's strategy for a long time, specially in the budget market which started all the way back in the 80s.

The Gameboy Pocket, Light and later the Color (if you consider it part of the original Gameboy line) all used this method of thinking. Technology gets better, prices cheaper, aesthetics prettier.
And while I'm not a fan of Nintendo, I can't wait to see if we'll ever get a definitive Switch, something even prettier and more ergonomic... maybe without joycon drift at last.

But why did I think about this?

Well, I got this!

This beautiful blue DS Lite that was pretty much impeccable. Purchashed it from my friend's store at a measly $50, came with charger and stylus just fine. But I'd say the state in which I found this thing was worth the price of admission already.

The back is a little more scratched up but that's normal. I must say as a constant console trader that this is one of the best speciments of DS Lites I've seen around my area... Actually it's the first Lite I ever see!
All the others were pictures and dearly uninteresting. Just absolutely atrocious conditions, screw that.

My friend from Indiana gifted me a R4 card sometime ago along with other Murican' trinkets and it finally found its use. The card sometimes doesn't connect properly but it's nothing that a quick reseat doesn't fix. No crashes so far in games.

Of course using it for emulators and homebrew.

And uh, backups.

Playing through the DS Pokémon titles, Mario stuff, Kirby, etc in such a small screen is honestly not bad. In fact, this is better than I remember on the DSi XL.
PPI really does matter when you're talking picture quality and the DS Lite delivers on that.
It also feels more ergonomic than I expected despite being so small.

Overall it's a decent little system, and remembering all the improvements the DSi brought in an era of smartphones and powerful hardware for cheap and with such simple software, and then looking at this, makes it abundantly clear what Nintendo did in the past, and maybe looking at the past might give us hints for the future.

Maybe one day I'll be posting about some kinda of "New Nintendo Switch XL Pro Extreme Edition" or whatever hahahaha