Review: Nintendo DS Web Browser

I thought it would be fitting I wrote this review through the DS itself, using the new web browser program, unfortunately when I did it turned out something like the picture to the left. That image actually sums up the usefullness the browser actually serves, but I'll go into a bit more explanation how such a simple program could go horribly wrong.


First, there is no plug-in capabilities. That means no Flash, Java, Quicktime or anything interesting. Youtube won't work, you can't play online games, you can't even listen to midis. Actually, most sites you probably go to (i.e. Facebook) will not run on this. The only thing the browser can handle are pictures and text, and even that is questionable. It takes forever to load anything, it almost forces you turn use it's "disable images" feature to load within a minute, which is alot longer if you've gotten used to broadband.


The browser does has a very good user interface though, you can read your sites in two ways; the Blackberryesque SSC mode that makes everthing fit into one long collumn and you just scroll through the page, or the DS Overview mode where you use the bottom screen to pan around a shrunken site to see a full size version on the top. I definately prefer the Overview mode, but it really sucks when you try and view an image that is just a bit bigger than your viewing space because it won't all fit on the top screen and it's still too small to spread across the bottom one.


You can bookmark websites like any normal browser, and even create a custom homepage of links and a search engine (default: Yahoo!). The text input also comes in two flavours, a QWERTY kepad, or a ridiculously unweildy and unpredictable Brain Age style handwriting recognition. I do not reccomend using it to type at any length, and you can't use it as a portable entertainment device. That really means it's best use is looking things up on Wikipedia. Like if in a pinch you needed to know what colour the poisonous tree frogs were, this could help; but it'd take so long to connect and load you'd probably die wondering.