[News] Wii browser first impressions

[tomsamson]

As there has been some discussion about the wii browser/its flash capabilities here recently and i just downloaded it and played around with it quickly (can´t do much more now,close to a deadline..),here are my first impressions:

First of all i´ve downloaded the free trial version which is available for download since today (the 22nd,may be in some hours depending on where you are located).
Trial means not everything is final yet and some things will be improved for the full release version in spring.

However,to sum up my first impressions right away it already works way better than i´d have expected from a browser running on a console.
Now a bit of a more detailed rundown:

general browsing:
-JS/HTML Rendering Functionalities seem to work fine as far as i can tell after the first quick round, i tried around 30 websites and all displayed without any problems whatsoever.

You can scroll and zoom in/out using the wiimote,go back and forth,add favorites,there´s also word autocompletition for quicker address typing.

flash content playback/performance:
Checking the flash version on the adobe page i noticed it has a player v 7.0.70.0 installed,so yeah,no flash 8/9 content will run on it.
Trying to download a newer player version leads to a "File format/octet-stream not supportet" warning.

Ok,so back to testing flash content v7 and older which is only controlled via mouse (or now wiimote ) :

flash enabled sites:
Sites like youtube.com work perfectly fine,i´ve watched several lengthy movies whithout any problems.

flash games:
game playback is as i said restricted to mouse controlled v7 and older games of course but yeah,besides that i had no problems playing the games i tried.

Overall the flash content display performance is quite good (way better than the wacky bulked v6 psp player for example),i could play most games pretty smooth.
I´ve also loaded our monster trucks on miniclip,which i can´t control of course as it needs more keys but yeah,although it runs lots of math calculations every frame refresh the performance was higher than i expected (smooth),too.
I then played several mouse controlled games and all worked very well.
Also great: as said earlier you can zoom in on any content and therefore zoom in on games,too, to have em displayed pretty much fullscreen.

ok,so much on this for now,overall,thumbs up to Opera and Nintendo,hope they add a newer version of the player for the final release but even as it is now this is a pretty comfortable solution for surfing on your couch without keyboard and mouse