Nintendo DS Lite - Hardware

The Nintendo DS is very well known as gaming console, but less as a portable sketchbook or as an organizer.

Since it's not official and there's no active advertising for the so called "home brew" software, those 3rd party applications are less popular. More information about "home brew" DS can be found on wikipedia.

I use the DS exclusively as a highly portable sketch book. Folded it has the size of a wallet, therefore it can follow me anywhere.

The battery life time of over 19 hours at brightness level 1 (enough for my taste) sounds pretty impressive too.

When I purchased the DS, I wanted to make sure to get a model with a black interior.

I found the white DS distracts you too much, whereas the black version frames your image properly and allows better focus.

To enable home brew applications a special memory card is required. I think 1GB for a MicroSD card is more then enough for the painting purpose, since those images are pretty small (512x384).

Following link shows a place where you could buy this kind of chips:  

Colors! - Software

Colors! is a simplistic painting application for Nintendo DS based on modern techniques developed for drawing tablets in programs like Photoshop and Painter. By taking advantage of the pressure sensitivity (yes, it does exist!) of the DS touch-screen it becomes a perfect portable digital sketch-book.

The program is free and can be directly downloaded here: http://www.collectingsmiles.com/colors/  

Additionally there is a java program that allows you to export the 

recorded brush strokes as AVI movie: http://colors.brombra.net/downloads.php