Review: Nintendo DS Browser
"Whhaaaa?" I hear you mutter... A web browser? For a glorified GameBoy? Well, actually yes, and it does work, though with quite a few reservations.....
The DS and DS Lite have Wi-Fi, of course, as part of their multi-player gaming functionality. So why not use this to reach out to an Internet router instead and thus get online? Opera are the browser developers who have stepped up to the plate, although in order to make the solution work they've had to also ship a memory (RAM) upgrade on a separate cartridge - this plugs into the GameBoy Advance slot and is different for DS and DS Lite, so make sure you buy the right one.
Time to try the Nintendo DS Browser out for real. My neighbour has Wi-Fi, so I sat down in his study and tried to connect. Ouch. It turns out that Opera on the DS doesn't work with WPA encryption, one of the most common methods for protecting Wi-Fi networks.
Undeterred, it was off to a friend's house, knowing that his Wi-Fi network used WEP encryption, which I knew Opera DID support. Over the next hour we tried everything we could think of, from simple entering of the WEP key into the Nintendo DS Browser's setup dialogs to fiddling with explicit IP addresses and even sub-net masks (getting seriously nerdy here). To no avail, at every turn we came up against the error message below:
Given that most Wi-Fi networks are either WPA or WEP, it was time for a last resort. I headed down the road, where a contact of mine maintains a proper 'open' Wi-Fi network that anybody can jack into. Success at last and connection only took a few seconds. Here's this site's front page, rendered in Opera's SSR (Small Screen Rendering) mode:
There's also an 'Overview' mode, in which the page is shown rendered as if on a large-screened desktop, and you can then move around a focus point onto the bit of content you want to see. Opera seem to have thought of everything in terms of the interface, with links on the bottom screen being selected using the stylus, of course, and with the d-pad being used to move quickly from link to link. The shoulder buttons are used with the d-pad to scroll the entire page up and down.
There are a wealth of nice touches and stylus/button shortcuts which I won't go into here, but suffice it to say that you soon find your way around.
The problem is that the Nintendo DS is under-powered for web browsing and, even on a fast Wi-Fi link, images take an eternity to appear. Complex pages can take over a minute to render - so you'll find yourself restricted to, for example, the so-called 'mobile web'. The speed really is an issue and if you were thinking of using the DS instead of your home PC then think again, everything takes between two and five times as long to accomplish.
The setup problems I experienced only add to my impression that you have to really, really want to browse the Web on your Nintendo DS Lite to make it worth the initial hassle and slow performance.
Full credit to Opera Software for producing an amazing and innovative piece of programming - they've certainly done everything they could - but I for one was underwhelmed by the whole Browser experience.