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DS-X REVIEW by modchipman

First off, we'd like to thank the DS-X team for providing us with a sample of the DS-X, we're very appreciative. Secondly, to avoid a big long mess of a review, we've done some linkages to pictures, so please feel free to checkout a bunch of pictures of the DS-X at http://forums.modchipman.com/viewtopic.php?t=145.

Now, on to the review.

Initial Impression:

The DS-X comes in a small box, around 3.25" x 3" x 1.5". The box is quite decorated with their logo and url. Great, wonderful, it's a box, and it does its job... contains the product. In the box, you receive 2 things: your DS-X and a min-A usb cable to plug the ds-x to your pc (for copying media over to the DS-X). So, on initial impressions, you get a nice package with everything you need to start using the DS-X, quite a surprise from other packages out on the market which require you to purchase additional passme devices or memory cards.

IT HAS LEDS - Yes, it has leds. It's wonderful, and essentially serves no purpose except for some baseline entertainment and a snifter of the "COOL FACTOR". Even cooler than just having 2 LEDS whose colors you can control (it has an RGB level, you change the various levels of Red/Green/Blue and you get different colors on the LED) you have the option of choosing "DANCING LEDS" which blink in crazy sequences and colors when playing music. It's fun, it's cool, and you might get a date out of it.

NO PATCHING - Yes, its correct, you don't need to patch your nds backups. You don't need to run media through any proprietary software prior to loading it to your cart, its just plug and play, drag and drop, simple as it gets folks.

NDS SIZED CART - You got it, this cart is small as the NDS games, fits into the NDS slot (slot-1) and has a mini-a usb port for external programming.

PASSME CAPABILITIES- For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of passme, its a technology used to allow DS owners to run homebrew ds applications off their DS. Normally, all DS-oriented apps/programs are encrypted, and the passme circumvents this so that people can use homebrew DS applications. It's a great feature normally programmed into a slot-1 (nds) card (i.e. passcard3, ez pass3, superkey, etc) and with the advent of the DS-X, this technology is actually built into the DS-X itself. At this time, however, we've only been successful using this function with the ez4 lite and the supercard. The M3 is not working with the passme feature of the DS-X.

BUILT-IN STORAGE SPACE- Common misconception (if you don't pay attention) is the size of this cart. People continually think that the size is 4 gigabytes, but in reality, its 4 Gigabit. The bit/byte ratio is 8:1. So a 4Gigabit cartridge is actually 512 megabytes. This cartridge has a full fledged 512megabytes you can use for your media. Storage space demystified. 512 megabytes is quite adequate for most users. If you're going to want to put a plethora of music and videos, then you might consider removable media options, but for what it's worth, a 512megabyte option is pretty good for 70-80% of the consumers.

DURABILITY- It's a DS sized cartridge. You're not supposed to be able to bite it or step on it and have it work still. We always love those reviews about how 'durable' something is. For what it's worth, we felt the USB port to be something of concern. The USB cable plugs in very tight and pulling it out, we just had this feeling that... somewhere down the line, someone is going to yank that USB port right out of the cart. It seems reinforced quite a bit so we're not worried. Just don't go HULK on your DS-X, you won't like it when you're angry.

COST- If you price out the various parts that the DS-X is combining, you have a 512megabyte cart (roughly $100) and a passme device (roughly $30). That's overshooting the cart price and overestimating the overall cost, and compared with its closest competitor (we dare not consider the ninjapass a competitor), the G6 LITE, it's roughly $10-$20 over the cost of the g6lite/passcard3 combo. What are you getting for the additional cost? Convenience of no patching, luxury of 1 item vs. 2, a slot-1 device (keeps slot-2 available for other carts), and a few bells/whistles like the LEDS and plug and play. I'd say for $20 more than its closest competitor, it does the job. A TAD overpriced, but for the time being, for what it does, it's definitely worth it.

CONVENIENCE - Before the DS-X, a customer would have to purchase at least 2, if not 4-5 parts, to complete a combo that would allow them to fully utilize the power of the DS homebrew/media. The DS-X has combined these parts into one solid NDS slot-1 sized product, meanwhile eliminating the concept of using software to copy media over to the cart. Bravo.

SKINNING OF GUI - Last second addition to the review, skins can be interchanged (at the current time) by just replacing the /skin/default with whatever skin you'd like. Skins will most likely be downloadable and offered by many people out there. It's a cool concept, makes your system custom... and you now can look at pamela anderson while listening to music.

Grade: A

Ease of Use:

Since we operate a website that sells this product, our review focused on the OOBE, or Out of Box Experience. Our customers vary from seasoned veterans to neophytes who wish to just get something going for the first time. So, as a result, we decided that we'd gauge all the aspects of the DS-X in regards to a customer receiving the item and being able to use it for the first time. Here were our results...

music capabilities:

One of the main components of a media cart is its ability to play music and play it effectively and efficiently. We decided that in this day and age, most people tend to use the .mp3 format and even then, they tend to use the quality of 160kbps or higher. So, to test out the music capabilities, we decided to grab 10 .mp3s varying from 160kbps to 320kbps (a tad overkill, but still common) and run the DS-X through the gauntlet.

Copying the music over was as simple as copying music on your PC. We plugged the DS-X into our PC using the included cable and instantly received a notice regarding a new storage device and how we'd like to proceed (we clicked 'open folders'). We made a folder on the root called music and began copying music over (copying files over was very quick). Just for fun we made 5 dirs under the music folder and called them 1-5, and moved various mp3s into each folder (to test recursive directory searching). Unplugged the cable, plugged in the DS-X, turned on the DS LITE, clicked on the DS-X, clicked MUSIC. Then we chose LIBRARY (this is where it 'built' a library). One thing to note is that the DS-X will recursively search your entire cart for the formats (.mp3 and .ogg) and build a library for you. This is nice for those of you who love to organize your music into folders.

So now we were confronted with a list of options, and we chose ALL SONGS. Now here's where you have a few options, but you wouldn't notice it unless you tried it out. If you HOLD down the A button while choosing a song, it'll ask you if you want to QUEUE it or PLAY it or CANCEL the selection. We personally feel that this is a tad clunky, but a great beginning. You can "QUEUE ALL" by holding A on the main music menu where it says "ALL SONGS". Thanks LETO for letting modchipman know that :O

So we queued up all our songs, from 160kbps to 320kbps. Most songs played fairly well except the 320kbps. They tended to lag the GUI (graphic user interface) initially but after a few songs the lag was no longer apparent. Most of you will be happy to know that you can close the lid and have music play (for those of you who wish to use the DS as an mp3 player). If you've got a playlist going, you can toggle back/forth between songs by hitting the R or L triggers, pretty nice.

Options on the MUSIC menu included repeat, stop, pause, shuffle, playlist, and library. You'll get a nice ID3 tag excerpt on the screen. This included Title, Artist and Album.

Grade: B

(A limitation of the DS itself, but the LAG that occurs when playing music is a tad annoying. Would love to see visualizations when playing music, but then again, if it's lagging during PLAYING the music, not really expecting much more to happen.)

apps menu:

Well here you have a plethora of options based on what you want to use your DS for. We personally like a few really nice homebrew applications such as MOONSHELL and DS ORGANIZE. Both are wonderful apps for the DS and sometimes do require some configuration and tweaking to get going properly. We decided to test each out with the DS-X to see how HOMEBREW applications functioned.

moonshell

Moonshell, for those who are not familiar with it, is a media playing application. It specifically targets the playing of videos and pictures, but can be used for other medias. We wanted to test it's capabilities with the DS-X so we did a little bit of both. The moonshell installer installed the appropriate software onto our DS-X and we just ran with it. We first chose a video we had converted (the moonshell package comes with dpg tools which includes an encoder, decoder, etc.. you use them to convert your .wmv and other movie formats into the DS friendly dpg format). It was very simple to drag/drop a .wmv into the encoder, then grab the .dpg and toss it over to a folder on the DS-X. We also copied some pics over, to test the pic viewer. Then we ran the moonshell application by first clicking APPS from the DS-X main menu, then moonshell.nds. It executed, loaded, and gave us a file browsing menu from which we picked out our video. Without ANY problems, the video began playing on the top screen. You can have the video play on the bottom screen as well (one or the other or both (not stretched, just same video on both screens)).  Pictures were essentially the same experience, unbelievably simple.

The hardest thing in this whole experience with MOONSHELL was deciding which video to test on the DS-X. We decided it would be entertaining to play a video of one of our friends, drunk, dancing to "SEXY BACK". It was quite amusing when we showed it to him.

Grade: A

ds organize

DS Organize is a very useful organization application for the DS. It features a calendar, planner, address book, etc. Overall, makes your DS much more useful than it already is, .. great app. Some people have quite a few problems getting DS ORGANIZE to work with their cards. We decided we'd give it a shot on the DS-X and see what if any problems we'd encounter. So we uncompressed the DSorganize app, copied it to its own folder on the DS-X, and then ran the APPS option and subsequently the DSOrganize app. It loaded quickly and we were off to the races... planning our next few weeks of events and putting all the names and numbers of the lovely ladies we encounter into our DS. (sigh). Overall, absolutely no problems using the DSOrganize app with the DS-X. Easy as pie

Grade: A

Overall Ease of Use: A

Battery Life:

Here's when we got really bored and decided that we'd test out the battery life doing some silly things. You might be entertained, you might be bored, but here goes

mp3 playing -

lid closed, leds turn off - with the lid closed and mp3s playing in a playlist through headphones, we were able to play for around 5.5-6.5 hours, leaning towards the 6.5 hours. Pretty cool information for those of you who wanted to use the DS-X in conjunction with the DS but feared the battery drainage.

lid closed, leds turned on - same deal as above, but we were only able to get 4.5-5 hours of battery life, significantly lower

lid closed, dancing leds on - same as initial test, but we were only able to pull out 4-5 hours of life off a fully charged battery, so dancing leds vs regular leds does make a difference.

You may notice that we did not test the battery life during music playing while the lid was OPEN. This was just a common sense factor that most people are probably listening to music while traveling, or at least in motion. Keeping the lid open is probably not very common, so we didn't test the battery life with the lid open and playing music.

Overall, LEDS kill your battery life. We didn't test the battery life with gaming capabilities but if there's any indication of resources and usage of the cart, it's not draining much battery life at all UNLESS you use the LEDS in some fashion. Hey, we all have a desire to be cool, pimp out your LEDS and carry your charger.. you'll be alright.

OVERALL:

PROS:

• Size

• Speed (internal memory is normally faster than removable memory)

• Built-in passme

• LEDS

• plug n play

• no patching

• doesn't drain battery

• good support (so far, so good)

CONS:

• Price (could be $10-$15 cheaper)

• no GBA support as of yet (stated as 'coming soon')

• plugging the DS-X into the DS while the usb cable is still connected (to ds-x and pc) causes the DS-X to hang (is being addressed)

• lags a bit on mp3 playing, but thats more a limitation of the DS rather than the DS-X

• some homebrew isn't working, nothing we tested, but some things are still shaky, will most likely work in time

• LEDS (yes, a great benefit, but a great drawback because it kills the battery)

There you have it. A WWW.MODCHIPMAN.COM review of the DS-X. For the money and the features, its a great starter kit for many people out there. If you already have a slot-2 (gba slot) cart, this is a great add-on for your collection. Have fun gaming