The DSi XL will make gaming easier and certainly more interactive with the screen really making this something to shout about. It's more in your face and packs a better punch. The downside of course is that it's bigger, heavier and therefore less likely to fit in your pocket or bag without filling all the available space.

The price and limited upgrade makes it a difficult purchase to justify. “I want to play more socially” is not a reasonable excuse to buy a $190 game console[...]Satisfied DSi owners have no need to purchase the XL, because it isn’t an upgrade. On the other hand, once you have it in hand at home to compare with the older models, there’s no contest. The DSi XL outshines and outperforms, because when it comes to gaming, bigger may indeed be better.

Since Nintendo first asserted sole domination over the handheld gaming market with the release of the paperback-sized Game Boy in 1989, the company has striven time and again to make its pocket systems smaller, meeting fantastic financial success along the way. Nintendo did it with the Game Boy Pocket, the Advance SP, the Micro, the DS Lite and again ever so slightly with the DSi - the last even at the expense of backwards compatibility and battery life. Now, for the first time in the company's history, it's made an existing platform bigger, with questionable reasons as to why.