I shan't be getting one, for two main reasons:
1)It's too big to carry in my pocket.
2)The screen size is bigger, but the resolution is exactly the same, meaning that the 3DS XL will have a picture that is far less crisp and sharp than the original 3DS (this was the main reason I didn't buy the DSi XL; I found the blown-up picture almost unplayable).
It depends on what games you are playing. If you're playing Pokemon, where everything is rendered as a sprite, yes, this will look terrible. However, with the 3ds games' high resolution textures and polygons, as opposed to sprites, the larger screen will actually make for a better detailed game. Why? Because there is more room for the detail. I don't believe Nintendo would make the hardware render the game and then blow it up. I believe they make the 3ds render the image proportional to the smaller screen. That being said, if you have a 1024x1024 texture being rendered on a square that is 100x100, you will see less detail than if you render the same texture on a square that is 190x190 (90% larger screen).
Also, you need to compare the dis and the 3ds. The 3ds is so much more powerful. That means the 3ds is capable of rendering better graphics, and using more complex calculations due to its superior ram. So of course the dsixl will look like shit. The dsi was only capable of limited 3d (not true 3d) due to its small amount of ram and memory. The 3ds however, can use more memory, which means it can use better textures and graphics. Which also means more polygons, as opposed to sprites.
I'm a programmer. A sprite will get blown up because it is image data, not shapes. The image data can't miraculously show a crisper image with data it doesn't have. With a polygon, the shap is rendered on the fly. Not with a texture. So the polygon will be created to its full potential. Don't confuse polygons and textures. They are two different things.
Textures get applied to a polygon. The graphics hardware uses as much of the texture as it can. That's why when a application that doesn't have mipmapping looks terrible when the character is far away. The system has to use as much of the texture as it can on the polygon, with little space left. So you get a terrible mess. With the 3ds XL, the polygon will appear larger at a further distance, so the texture will actually look better.
However, it all depends on how everything is rendered. From the preview, the system looked promising, because the games kept all of their detail and actually looked better
Now with the dsi XL, new super Mario bros actually looked nice because believe it or not, Mario was not a sprite. Mario was a character rendered in 3d.
