BitSnark

Nintendo’s fascination with making their portable hardware offerings larger and less, well, portable continues with the announcement that like it’s DSi predecessor, the Nintendo 3DS will be getting a size increase.

Known as the ‘Nintendo 3DS LL’ in the land of the rising sun and ‘Nintendo 3DS XL’ in the West, this new iteration of their 3D handheld boasts a screen that is 90 percent bigger, with both screens benefiting from the increase in size. For the pendants out there, we’re told that the top screen measures at 4.88 inches, while the bottom screen is 4.18 inches; highlighting the same 90 percent gain in size on both displays.

Battery-wise, you should see a slight gain in juice over the current iteration of the console; Nintendo is saying that the unit will last for 3.5 to 6.5 hours for 3DS games (compared to the 3 to 5 hours with the original unit) and 6 to 10 hours for DS titles (compared to 5 to 8 with the original unit).  In terms of release, the handheld releases on July 28th in the UK for around £149.99 and August 19th in the US for $199.99.

The unit will ship in Black, Black x Blue, and Black x Red colours.

In all honesty i’m finding it a little difficult to get excited about the proposition of this hardware ‘revamp’.

Firstly, why wasn’t this announced at the 3DS presser at E3? (I suppose it couldn’t have been mentioned at the main presser, because Ninty were far too busy shafting the WiiU at the time)  Despite my own personal reservations about this newest iteration of the handheld, i’m quite sure that it nevertheless would have stirred some additional interest in the platform.

Secondly, i’m a little stunned at the fact that Nintendo haven’t decided to include that additional circle pad on the thing with all the extra real-estate that they have to work with now.

And lastly, the much larger screen means that games which struggle to look smooth in the original display – owing to the low-resolution that the handheld displays it’s games at, will look even worse when they’re stretched that much more by the additional size of the screens.

So whilst it hasn’t exactly set my world on fire; how do you folks feel about it?

That is some increase in size there isn’t it? I can’t say it’s really for the better though.

Nintendo will launch the 3DS XL in Europe on July 28th for roughly £149.99 and in the US on August 19th for $199.99.