Such a thing as too little features

Ever since the handheld wars were waged between the PSP and the DS from the moment they were released, I have done nearly nothing but shower the DS with praise while putting down the PSP, if only secretly in the latter case. But over time, once the novelty has worn off, it’s always easier to see the little niggling errors that all add up to a whole lot more annoyance than they should provide.

Something I noticed ages ago, but has only recently become an issue is the problem of the DS’s standby mode. There’s nothing particularly wrong with it in and by itself of course; you close the DS, and it goes into standby, waiting until you open it again to continue playing. No big deal right? Sure, but when you look at the PSP’s standby mode, you’ll see why Nintendo didn’t quite put as much thought into it as they could have. The PSP’s standby mode actually turns off the console in the process, and hence can be held indefinitely – meaning that no matter how long you leave it that way, it will never run out of juice. In the case of the DS however, this is not so. The DS doesn’t turn itself off completely, but instead goes into a semi-dormant mode in which it has to keep an electrical current going in order to keep its RAM (temporary storage to those people who don’t understand) refreshed and basically able to remember the data of your current game. In the PSP’s case, it uses persistent storage that doesn’t need a current to refresh it.

While this isn’t really a huge issue considering how the DS has lightning fast load times, allowing the user to just switch off completely after saving his progress in-game and resume at a moment’s notice, there are some instances where it’s really, really necessary. Right now, I have a game of Tetris in progress which I’ve had going since last night, on and off. Since Tetris obviously doesn’t have a mid-game save feature, I have to use the DS’s standby mode while doing other things that are necessary for me to actually stay alive such as eating, sleeping and so on. Unfortunately this poses a problem, because should I ever leave it alone on standby for too long, it will shut itself down at some point due to the battery running flat – unlike the PSP’s standby which I can use for an endless amount of time.

At this point you’re probably scoffing and saying what an idiot I am, since I can just leave it in the charger while it’s on standby and I’ll be fine. Well unfortunately that’s wrong, because the charger stops working once the battery reaches 100% – thus letting it slowly dwindle back down until I unplug and plug it back into the charger. That, or the battery runs out.

Now putting this into perspective, it’s really not that much of a big deal to incorporate into the system. Basically, the DS has 4MB of main memory, coupled with 16KB of memory belonging to the processor as well as another 64KB of internal RAM. Added up, it totals to ( (1024000 x 4) + (1024 x 16) + (1024 x 64) = ) 4177920 KB which is approximately 4.178 MB of memory. Compare this to the PSP’s already large 32MB only in its main memory and you can see how silly it was to omit the persistent standby option in the DS. It really wouldn’t have taken much at all – how much does a 1GB solid state memory card cost nowadays? The DS would have needed less than half of a hundredth of that amount (that is, less than 1/200 of a GB). Of course there would be added costs for the work involved in implementation, but I seriously doubt that copying something to and from main memory that tiny is something so complex that it would have badly affected the DS’s price tag or, even more importantly, its manufacturing costs.

I do wish the idea had occurred to them while developing the system as it really isn’t such a demanding prospect – but then again, hindsight is always 20-20.