So my girlfriend got her 3DS yesterday. I was both excited and a bit envious; we have (of course) separate spending accounts, so she could afford one while I couldn't, which annoys me a bit since I'm the biggest game nerd of the two of us. However, she got it primarily to be able to play Pokémon Black in daylight, since she only has a trusty old DS Phat, while I have a DSi.

The 3DS hardware looks really good; the finish is very glossy but sturdy plastic, and the Aqua Blue color looks really good. It also feels good in the hands.
But the first caveat I noticed was the D-Pad and Slide Pad: Both are very uncomfortable in my hands. I have average-sized European hands, but when holding it comfortably in my palms the D-Pad felt really awkward, as it's pretty far down on the system. The Slide Pad was even worse; it's very close to the top, and my thumb immediately felt strained when I slid it around. It also wasn't that smooth, but that might be because it was new hardware.

The screens are a bit smaller than on the DSi, but they're big enough. However, the 3D effect really leaves you wondering how many people will be able to play this without getting major eye strain and headaches. The effect is convincing – it is 3D without the glasses – but viewed slightly from a different than optimal angle and you see double, and the immersion is immediately ruined. Combine this with the fact that the Augmented Reality games Nintendo ship the 3DS with, where you have to move yourself and the 3DS around targets to shoot them, in real space, and you're bound to experience it pretty quick. It just makes you flip off the 3D pretty fast.

The 3D camera suffers from the same fate. 3D images are really cool to take, and it does look pretty amazing, but when you try to take the pictures in 3D mode, you end up looking at the screen at angles that break the 3D effect. But you need to be able to see the 3D effect to take the pictures properly, because of the 3D autofocus.

Now, my girlfriend didn't buy any games for the 3DS as she didn't want any of the launch titles, so after having played with AR and the camera for a while, she tried booting up Pokémon Black. While I didn't expect the upscale mode to look great, I was really not expecting it to look this bad; everything is really blurry. Text was painful, crisp lines were turned into half-pixel nightmares and the colors were way off. Contrast and color schemes were very different, leading to gradients looking smudged and colors that should be clear and high contrast to end up glaringly bright and faded. We were not amused.

The next step was to try to play Pokémon Black in the 1:1 scale mode. You have to hold in Start + Select when launching the game for this to be enabled, which is a silly button combination given the hardware's layout. When played in 1:1, however, the screen area you get is really small. Much smaller than a DS Phat screen, and it doesn't fix the colors either. My girlfriend said she'd play it on the 3DS, since she felt it was better than the DS Phat, but my own verdict is that it's a no-go. It's unplayable. I'd actually prefer my DS Phat over the 3DS to play my Pokémon White or any other DS game. But since I'm used to my DSi, it really is too many steps backward to be playing a DS game on the 3DS. It looks like shit.

Summary:
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I've been giving the 3DS a spin, and while the 3D effect is good, it's worse than I had expected. I had hoped for at least a little bit higher tolerance of viewing angles. My eyes got strained after about five minutes of playing with it, and while it might have been because the image went "out of focus" a few times while I played, that's still the real world scenario; you never sit perfectly still with the screen at a perfect distance and angle from your face. So, in a real world scenario, I'll probably find myself disabling the 3D effect most of the times.

Playing DS games on the 3DS does not work very well. You get completely botched colors and either an up-scaled blurry image, or a 1:1 image that is too tiny to be anywhere near comfortable. Keep your DS Phat, Lite or DSi about for your DS games.

Hopefully the games coming out, like Zelda and Mario Kart, won't be relying on the 3D effect for their gameplay mechanics. If they do, I might not even buy the console for myself. I am a Nintendo fan boy, and it hurts to admit that for the first time, I am disappointed in a Nintendo console.