It may not be as sleek and sexy as playing UMD movies on your oh-so-gorgeous PSP screen, but at least the Nintendo DS now has a way to play many common media types. The Max Media Dock will be available this week - the dock works as follows: First, you plug a media reader into your DS game slot, and then an adapter in the GBA slot allows you to plug in Compact Flash cards and load music, movies, or even homebrew executables. The dock will ship in 3 versions - a $30 version that just contains the media dock, and a $55 and $85 versions that ship with 1 and 2 GB Compact Flash cards, respectively.

This probably won’t sell a lot more DS units - after all, most folks who wanted a portable game machine that also does movies and music probably already own a PSP. Still, the Dock might be worth it just for the homebrew DS game possibilities it opens up.

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