I love my Nintendo DS lite. LOVE. I've had it for ages, yet still use it unlike most things. Maybe it's the portability...or maybe it's that I have a flash card + awesome firmware. Don't know what Nintendo DS flash cards are? I wrote an article on them awhile back called Storage Devices / Flashcards for the Nintendo DS that you can look at. Mind you, this was written before the release of the Nintendo DSi, but the same cards do exist for this newer device.
I use the M3 Real for my DS. It gives my DS the capabilities to do almost anything and makes playing homebrew games or using homebrew applications easy. I even use IRC on it. Now, to get to the point. A while back I decided to switch the firmware I used on my DS -- switching to a translated English copy of M3 Sakura.
The firmware is very stable. You have a choice between the standard Sakura interface (which is sexy as hell, not to mention useful) and the old, original Touch Pod interface.
Sakura by default does a ChkDsk during startup. This can be very useful for obvious reasons -- and even helped me out a few months back. My gf's DS was crashing repetitively every time a certain file/area was scanned. Her DS always has issues for whatever reason (probably a dying memory card) so I appreciate the added feature. Sakura also can contain LOADS of skins, whereas the original Touch Pod cannot. You are limited to handful, 3 or 4 (something around that number). Changing the skin takes seconds and is just utterly simplistic since all you have to do is load the skin file through standard navigation to make it happen. One of the best features about this firmware is that whenever you load your DS, a list of recently opened programs/games/etc is shown. These are sorted by "last opened" always so you can load whatever you were using last right away, opposed to Touch Pod, in which case you have to navigate to the folder, then look through the list (which can be huge). This is very useful for me, considering I have a 4gb microSD card which has loads of stuff packed on to it.
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