Wii Opera

Ahh, today saw the release of the Wii trial brow­ser powe­red by Opera; just as I was lamen­ting the pains of having to use my sis­ters lap­top to check my emails over this holi­day sea­son. Even though it is just a trial I am very impres­sed so far; full sup­port for Gmail and Goo­gle Rea­der AJAX and out of the box Flash sup­port that lets me watch You­Tube on the tele­vi­sion or load up my Last​.fm per­so­nal radio sta­tion whilst I pot­ter about. Impro­ve­ments should inc­lude tab­bed brow­sing and a box somewhere on the page that says what site or address you are visiting/on for secu­rity pur­po­ses, but I am sure these are in the works. On pages when the Wii deci­des it can’t cope the page disap­pears and the main brow­ser page appears in its place without war­ning — this is my only anno­yance so far. I’ll hold off on a pro­per review until the full pro­duct is relea­sed, howe­ver I can say this is a tidy little ver­sion to keep us going until then. 

The ease and speed with which everything loads on the Wii is also a good point to note, espe­cially after having fallen out with my PSP due to its exces­sive and ridi­cu­lous load times or even my PS2 and Xbox loa­ding times. It makes it very easy just to turn on, play some Wii ten­nis and then leave, a quick 5 minute game is exactly that, not a quick 5 minute game plus 10 minu­tes of loa­ding and options screens. 

A friend has bought me 1000 wii points to buy some games on the Vir­tual Con­sole, I think I’ll be get­ting bom­ber­man 93 at some point when I get a few more con­tro­llers but until then i’ll wait to see what else comes out. I can’t wait for Mario Kart 64.