Nintendo held an investors briefing in Japan last night where CEO Satoru Iwata has revealed some pretty interesting features of the Nintendo 3DS.
Iwata showed off the “Home” menu for the first time. Pressing the “Home” button pauses your current game and pulls up a list of applications you can access, such as Game Memo, Internet Browser, Friends List and Notifier.
Game Memo allows you to write messages on the lower screen while playing your game. You can make the upper screen show your paused-location of the game you’re currently playing. This way, you can write hints or reminders about the game. What's more, you can actually save these memos to the SD card as an image file.
Game Memo allows you to write reminders about your games, and save those to the SD card.
Friends List, again accessed via the Home button, allows you to see which of your friends are online and what game they are currently playing. This updates automatically when you connect to a WiFi access point. For privacy reasons (and for those who don’t want to be caught constantly playing Love Plus) you can set the console not to show game information. Furthermore, when a friend comes online your console’s LED will flash orange to notify you.
The Notification App will display information gathered from using Street Pass or Spot Pass modes. The Notification icon on the home screen will change when you have something new to view, and new items that have not yet been looked at will display a “new” icon.
The web browser was not demonstrated, however Iwata mentioned that it will become available via a firmware update in May. Nintendo will launch 3DS in Japan on February 26, at which point the full features will be revealed, but it looks as though even now there are a lot of features we have yet to discover.
You can see videos of the demonstrations by clicking
here.
Note: The page is in japanese, but the videos are to the left. If you are using Google's Chrome browser you can translate the page, and though it's not 100% accurate, it makes things a lot easier to understand if you, like me, can't read Japanese. ;]
Source.
Ultimately what it comes down to for me is how the features are implemented/the interface's ease of use, then what games are available. When it comes to graphics Sony and Microsoft are top of the line, but when it comes to accessibility and selling power, Nintendo brings it hard. :]
