The admirably lucky Stephen Totilo of MTV Multiplayer recently got to spend about half an hour with the Nintendo DSi, which was given a price and release date yesterday for the land of the free and home of the brave, plus its hat.

We've learned a bit about the console since its announcement and release in Japan last year, but as we should all know by now, we don't live in Japan, so not everything necessarily applies. So here's a little of what Totilo discovered about the DS Lite's successor.

Starting off, it seems the DSi is going to address a grievance I've had with previous iterations of the DS hardware: The user interface. While not difficult to use, it has had some inconveniences, such as the system having to shut down if you change the clock, or having to turn the entire thing off if perhaps you wanted to switch from the DS game you were playing to the Game Boy Advance game you had loaded.

Of course, with no GBA port, the latter becomes a moot point, but the DSi acts more like a console, in that you no longer have to power down to switch games, and it features a "soft reset" option that allows users to easily adjust their settings.

Much like the Wii's Channels, the DSi features icons you can touch and drag, arranging them however you like along a horizontal row likened to the PlayStation X-Media bar. One icon spotted was for updating firmware, which is another first for DS hardware, no doubt due to the DSiWare and downloadable applications.

There's no timetable set for the first of those applications, however. But the Nintendo reps available suggested that two of the Japanese programs they had on hand may be among the offerings to come here:

One was a numbers-adding game (sort of a sideways Sudoku-meets-"Tetris") called "Decode" that had to be played holding the DSi sideways in its "book style" format.

The other was "Wario Ware Snapped," which essentially brings "EyeToy Play" to the DSi. To play the game you have to set the DSi on a table, pointing the system's player-camera at your face. You hold your face and hands up to the system so that it can register their position and then you are thrown into "WarioWare" microgames that require you to wave your hands or shake your head to win them. As always, the games last just a few seconds each. -- MTV Multiplayer

Regarding the system's larger screen, Totilo popped in a game he was familiar with, Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, and saw that while the text was easier to read, there wasn't much else that was "meaningfully" different.

Another question put forth was whether the different size of the screens and the gap between them would affect older games which rely heavily on the touch screen, such as Yoshi's Tough and Go. Though told that it shouldn't be a problem, it was noted as something that should be worth watching for.

The conclusion reached is that the system is a definite improvement over the DS Lite which holds promise for the future, even in terms of gaming, but isn't quite what one would expect of a "DS 2." Be sure to check out the full article for even more information about the system and its innate applications.