I never had the original version of the DS but I do have the DS lite. and it has lasted me a long time and hopefully with stay around longer faithfully. I use it when I can, if I'm not busy doing work or an assignment or something.
The way I see it, is that instead of adding new pokemon into this sequel the creators are probably going to have some kind of pokemon armor or a pokemon combination occur since it looks like the two legendary pokemon there are combined with the ice dragon legendary pokemon.
I like Snivy mostly due to how cool he looks and because he's the grass starter..dunno why I just like the grass starter pokemon...well not so much for the Jhoto region I liked Cyntiquil for that one.
My favorite game series would possibly be the Pokemon series. It has been one of the longer running series that has been roughly consistent with the game play, which was rather enjoyable (<-a personal opinion) , and the series had a nice evolution of graphics throughout the years from red, and blue all the way to black and white.