Nintendo starts selling it’s new offering into the portable gaming market today, the Nintendo DSi and successor to the Nintendo DS.

It’s not the first time the DSi has been on sale however – it launched in Japan in Fall. The successor to Nintendo’s insanely-popular DS, which sold over 100 million units, offers a number of improvements over its older brother.  Most importantly however is the fact that over 850 Nintendo DS games will be fully compatible with the DSi.

Other signifigant improvements include the ability to purchase and download games from the DSi store. Two cameras also make an appearance, a 3.0 megapixel camera for the front and a 0.3 megapixel camera facing backwards. The DSi also saw a RAM upgrade to 256mb and now supports a SD slot for AAC music files. Crucially, the DSi doesn’t support MP3 files. The iconic double-screen design of the DS has also seen a size upgrade in the DSi – at the expense of battery life, which is reduced when compared to the older DS.

The new console will cost around $170 and comes in blue and black (no white for US customers). Nintendo also stated that the reason the DSi didn’t debut in the US earlier was thanks to the current Nintendo DS still selling so rapidly that they were afraid of damaging the DS’ sales!

Nintendo are planning to compete directly with the Apple iPod touch, which is busy eating into DS games sales.