Nintendo 3DS launching in February in Japan, March everywhere else

September 29, 2010

At Nintendo’s 3DS-centric press conference, the company announced it is launching the handheld in Japan on February 26, 2011. It will sell for 25,000 yen (roughly $300). A North American and European launch is scheduled for approximately one month later, but no price point has been revealed for those regions yet.

At the conference, Nintendo revealed that the 3DS will come packaged with a 2GB SD card and a charge station and will initially ship in two colors, Cosmo Black and Aqua Blue. The system features a beefed-up “tag mode” that allows the system to send and receive data from other nearby systems even when it is in sleep mode. This will work for multiple games at the same time, which means even if a specific game is not inserted in the 3DS at the time of a transfer, it can still participate in the tag mode. Finally, Nintendo’s new handheld is also capable of multitasking; you can press the Home button at any time during a game to launch various applications that show off stuff like play time and other stats.

Miis are also experiencing an upgrade with the 3DS. There’s a “Mii studio” that will allow you to take a picture of yourself to more accurately create your Mii avatar, as well as a tag mode Mii plaza that you can use to show off all the Miis you have collected wirelessly from the people around you. In addition, you can convert your Miis into QR codes, providing another simple way for you to share them with others (at least in Japan).

Here’s a Japanese video showing off the new features of the 3DS:

We also learned at Nintendo’s conference that the 3DS will feature its very own version of the Virtual Console service that will allow you to download Game Boy and Game Boy Advance titles as well as Nintendo classics that have been updated to support the new 3D screen.

Of course no conference would be complete without a video reel of games currently in development for the 3DS, right? We’ve got that right here:

What do you think about Nintendo’s announcements?