I went to Japan a few weeks ago and brought back an Enamel Navy Blue Nintendo DS Lite. It's now up for sale on eBay. (I was tempted to experiment with craigslist and see the results, but in the end, eBay won out as the place to liberate the DS Lite). The DS Lite is an awesome gaming platform, with some really great games available to it, like Animal Crossing, the New Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Cart, and Nintendogs (to name a few).
The DS Lite doesn't feel as toy like or cheap as the original Nintendo DS by being smaller, lighter, and having a nice glossy surface. The DS Lite has numerous improvements over the DS, and reinforces the idea to me that I should always wait for next gen Gameboy hardware. I've owned just about every iteration of the GameBoy platform, from the original green-screen GameBoy to the GameBoy Advance SP. One of the really smart things they did when making theses systems was complete backwards compatibility with previous game hardware, as well as being region-free.
As hot as the DS Lite was in Japan, it would appear that the popularity and demand for the system will also be high in the United States -- many U.S. retailers have stopped taking pre-orders for the system, and are now only selling the DS Lite as part of a $200+ bundle package. While I have my doubts that demand will be like the XBox360 (as the DS Lite is simply an upgraded DS, and historically second iteration gaming hardware just doesn't have the same demand as the first iteration, even when the first iteration has a power supply that burns out the game console (XBox 360).
View eBay Listing of Nintendo DS Lite
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