Wii: Internet Channel (trial version) impressions.
by Ross Catrow
WTF AWESOME!?
This morning I was, again, greeted by the cool pulsating glow of my best friend in the world Wii. “Oh shit!” I said, remembering that the Opera-made web browser was supposed to drop today. I’m not sure why I switched into a narrative right there, weird.
Anyway as is custom with downloading crap from the Wii Store I went through the following process:
- Step 1: try to connect to the Wii Store and fail.
- Step 2: reconnect to the Wii Store and succeed (after five minutes of waiting).
- Step 3: spend thirty minutes downloading whatever you need to download.
But huzzah of huzzahs I have the web browser and it might be … super awesome?
It seems to render things pretty fast, and since it uses the Opera engine it renders things as well as you could ask. Javascript seems to work well too: the slidy effect that happens when you click “touch” on Haduken (circa. 2006) worked great. I was able to log into gmail, myspace, and the admin panel for Haduken without issue. I did get an error of “unsupported protocol” while on myspace, but honestly that could be a zillion things. That place is a trash hole.
Television screens are pretty lowres and crappy for displaying awesome things like websites and facebook profiles, but Opera gives us two great tools to overcome this. First you get a cool zoom function. Point the Wiimote somewhere on the screen and hit the “+” button and BAM ZOOM. Most text, on my screen (30″ Sony CRT), is nearly legible. Zoomed in every thing reads like a piece of cake.
The second tool you get is “single column mode” which is activated by pressing “1.” Opera has had this in their browser for a while now and it is a neat feature. Basically it shrinks everything down into one column based on “source order.” For sites who have thought about how important source order can be for non-standard browsers, sites like Haduken.com, things look great and easy to read. Other sites may look like crap. YMMV.
My only two complaints thus far are a lack of tabs and the keyboard. Firefox tabs have really spoiled me and I almost don’t know how to browse the web without tabs. The keyboard (I think) is ABC order not QWERTY which is laaaaame. I mean come on.
I think I may actually use the browser on a regular basis. It is so convenient and easy to use. Plus, LBH, I am either watching netflix or playing the Wii and the browser is right there in front of me. I also might just leave my Wii on all the time, does anyone think that this could be a problem?
I’ll check back in a couple of weeks to see if I am actually using the Wii browser, or if it is more of a novelty.
Technorati Tags: nintendo, video games
Man, I swear I get more jealous the more you write about the it. In a good way, though… ;)
I meant… the more you write about IT. sorry.
Three things: the keyboard is actually QWERTY, you press “2″ to activate zoom mode, and there is some pretty sweet predictive text functionality built in. posted from my wii.
posting from my wii, not too bad with the recognition dealio – it did not anticipate me using ‘dealio’
I like the predictive text functionality too. As soon as I get a TV bigger than 13″, maybe things will look better. This is not posted from my Wii since they still won’t let me bring it to work for some reason.
that’s wierd.
tess.
i tried toa dd you but wiiconnect24 wasnt working when i did. i will try again today after work.
Everyone probably knows this already. But my son found it last night… He was pretty excited… Anyway, When playing wii tennis – if you hold down the 2 and the A right before the screen where you pick court position – you will play on a blue court – i think maybe its a clay court?? the game play does seem a little different.
Why didn’t they make it an option to play wii sports online…