Mooching about on the Amazon January sale site I spotted the Nintendo DS browser on offer for £14.99 and for that price I couldn't resist - damn your eyes, one-click ordering! It arrived the other day and after trying it out, I have to say I am quite impressed.
It's much the same as the Opera mobile browser but it makes good use of the dual screens. In the small screen rendering mode the page scrolls over both screens - useful for text based sites like Livejournal, Bloglines and the BBC news page. In overview mode one of the screens displays a scaled down version of the page with a 'window' that you move with the stylus to display a zoomed version on the other screen.
There are drawbacks - large, graphic heavy pages take a while to render and the response is sluggish until the page has loaded completely. There is no support for flash, multimedia or pdf extensions, and you can't download anything to store it locally. On the plus side, what it does, it does pretty effectively. Gmail and Hotmail are both quite usable for web based email - the on screen keyboard is surprising positive and usable for short pieces of text entry.
Bookmarks are stored on the cartridge and are easy to organise into sub folders. You can also specify which screen mode to use for each site by default. However, cookies are not stored between sessions so if you switch the ds off to play a game instead you will need to enter passwords again. A minor irritation, but not a huge problem as shutting the ds puts into a suspended mode that restores the previous session when you open it up again.
I now have two mobile browsers by my bed side to choose from, and Opera on the DS just edges it over Pocket IE on the iPaq for my major use which is to read blogs, email and news headlines whilst drinking my morning cup of tea.
1 comment:
Hmmm. Is a DS cheaper than a Blackberry? "It's for work, dear, honest!"
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