DSi Won't Immediately Replace DS Lite in US, 4th October 2008 (1up.com)
Nintendo believes they can keep selling DS Lites even after the DSi launches.
We know North America disappointingly won't get the DSi until "well into 2009," and we know Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime was surprisingly frank about the (arguably cynical) reason: They want to sell more DS Lites here first. And according to Cammie Dunaway, executive vice president of sales and marketing for Nintendo, they think they can continue selling DS Lites in the U.S. even after the DSi gets released, as the new DS model will not immediately replace the DS Lite in the same way the original DS was phased out when the Lite was introduced.
"Right now we're still working through what the strategy's going to be here," Dunaway explained to Game|Life in an interview (via Kotaku), after being asked whether the DSi would replace the DS Lite. "But we think that there's huge untapped potential for the DS Lite. Because when you've got only one in every five households in the U.S., compared to one in every two in Japan, it says there's potential. You've seen some of the work we've done this year with celebrities, that we're bringing a lot of new consumers in to the DS. So I think there's opportunity for both of them to coexist for some period of time."
By the sound of it, Nintendo seems to be approaching a strategy for the DS (at least in the U.S.) that's similar to the multi-package offerings Microsoft and Sony do with their respective consoles -- the DSi could be the "premium" unit, so to speak, with added functionality, while the DS Lite would continue to be offered as a cheaper alternative.
But, alas, we'll just have to wait and see how things develop when the DSi finally makes its way stateside, well into 2009 (...dag nabbit).