From the start, the Nintendo DS has been all about the games, but this philosophy is changing with the launch of the Opera DS Browser for the system. Announced some time ago now, it is already out in Japan and Opera were kind enough to send us down a unit to review for the DS Lite. After quite a bit of time playing about with it and trying to work out what all the crazy Japanese text means, we can now bring you our verdict.
First up, the Nintendo DS is not built to browse the Internet. No matter what anyone tells you, it doesn’t quite feel right. Sure, the touch screen interface and swanky browser features make it an enjoyable and easy experience, but viewing and navigating webpages doesn’t work as well as it should. Worries that the console is too slow to load bigger pages are all too clear, the DS runs at speed that is a lot slower than 56K dialup when using the official Nintendo USB Wi-Fi Adaptor. Still, this didn’t put us off.
We tested out the software on a number of pages, from Nintendo’s official site, to Cubed3, the BBC Website, Google and Amazon.
All of which had a varying level of success. The BBC Website works great on the ‘low graphics version’ for example, so we could catch up and browse through all the latest world news and sporting headlines. We then navigated to Cubed3 via Google, which was nice and easy to do. URL input is quite simple, you can either use an on-screen keyboard or physically write the letters of the URL in two little boxes, alternating from one to the other, each one containing one letter until the URL is complete, then you hit the enter button and off you go. Even our handwritten scrawl was recognised for the most part, which was a massive surprise.
There are two viewing modes in the browser, it can either be split through the two screens as one continuous display or the bottom screen can become a zoomed out view of the whole page with a selection box floating on it, the part of the webpage in the box is displayed on the top screen and you can move it around to clearly view different parts of the page simply by dragging your stylus across the screen. We found this version to be far easier for viewing most websites, as it doesn’t do strange things with the layout of the pages to get them to fit. For things like ‘low graphics’ versions and pages designed for portable devices the two-screen split is perhaps better.
All the normal settings are present and correct; you can view your history, set-up favourites, and flick back and forward through your recently viewed pages. It really is just like the normal Opera browser but smaller. The only thing holding it back is the lack of specialised portable device content on the Internet. So many webpages simply don’t work very well on the DS, but when going through imageless or quick loading sites specifically designed for mobile phones or PDAs, the browser does a great job. It looks great, it navigates superbly and everything is easy to read and quick to load.
On the brightness of the DS Lite screen everything looks really crisp and sharp and the screen display is excellent. The browser is quick to load and even in Japanese it is very easy to use. Sadly, it lacks additional features. You can’t navigate or use a lot of pages due to things like Flash content or embedded sound files, which is a bit of a pain, but far from the fault of the software. We have to applaud Opera for the software they have put together here it really is excellent.
The problem is, the Internet isn’t. We’d like to see Nintendo make the effort to make DS compatible pages for key areas such as news, sport, gaming, entertainment and the like (much like what can be found on mobile phones). We really can’t find fault with the software, even is browsing is a bit fiddly and slow, we’ve had great fun sitting in front of the TV with our DS Lite browsing the Internet and trying to impress people with our new gadget.
