I’ve been waiting for the DS Web browser for a long time. The thought of casually browsing all of the Internets in between frantic bouts of 4-player Tetris had been a dream of mine since I was just a small child living in a giant, magic box of Wonka Bottle Caps candy. (Still with me?) But now, or so it seams, that dream is a reality, as Opera’s new DS browser is here.
According to user reviews, it’s actually not horrible. There’s just no plug-in support what so ever. Music? no. Video? no. PDFs? no. What it does offer, however, is functional but fairly slow browsing capabilities. For $30, it might be worth a look. Check out user reviews here.
Oh, and did I mention there were two versions of the browser? Yup, one for DS Lite and one for the old school DS. Read up about the differences here. Thanks to Wikipedia for the pics.
That stinks that it didn’t turn out as well as it could’ve. Still, the nerdy part of me wants to check it out. Checking my email through my modern day Gameboy just seems to cool to pass up. I kind of expected that it wouldn’t do video or support other media types, as sad as that may seem. I may still get it for its novelty, though. To think, I used to play Tiger Electronic Games…look at handheld gaming now.
Actually, I might also pick this up. It doesn’t sound like too terrible of a browser… just slow and limited.
The Wii uses Opera as it’s browser, and it has some of the same characteristics like the lack of plugins. No biggie. It’s kinda cool looking at gamefaqs before I play. I used to use Opera instead of Internet Exploder before Firefox was in beta. It’s very functional and useful for quick browsing. I can see that they can build on it in the future. As for the DS, I don’t have one. I have a PDA phone which works alright for internets.
I’m not sure how functional the internets really is on the wii or DS since there’s no keyboard. The touchscreen of the DS and the wireless controller of the wii make it difficult for typing in my opinion. Are they charging $30 for the DS browser though? Did I hear correctly? That’s a little steep. Perhaps if they had a trial run to see how well it works, but otherwise that’s too much for a browser on a slow platform.