Details about Opera on the DS
Published February 17th, 2006 in Gaming, Internet, Technology
Some more details have arisen about the web browser that will be launched for the DS by Opera.
Armchair Empire recently interviewed Opera’s Executive Vice President of Devices, Scott Hedrick, about his company’s upcoming DS web browser. And while Hedrick opted to leave the juiciest details to be revealed by Nintendo at a later date, he was willing to offer up some new tidbits about the browser. [Joystiq]
The current version of Opera which they are still developing, allows users to surf the whole Interweb, however you can’t view flash content (Nintendo hasn’t commented or talked about possible upgrades). The browser will have two display settings. A fit-to-width mode and DS mode. The fit to width allows you to use both screens to span across pages, and the DS mode allows the top screen to view the web on, and the bottom screen can be used to ‘drag’ across he page to see which part you want to view. “Unfortunately, Hedrick was unable to comment on the Opera browser’s availability outside of Japan.” So we won’t know whether this will be Japan only or for the rest of the world.
I think it sounds like an interesting concept, but I still keep my opinion that the screen of the DS will be too small to do uch more than basic tasks like read email. I have a PSP and the browser is great, but even on that I find the screen (sometimes) limiting as the pages take a while to load and some page are quite large and I have to move back and forth to read content.
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For screens bigger is almost always better, but the DS doesn’t have a particularly small screen by our reckoning. A particularly common screen size for phones is 128×128 pixels, which is a third of the size of each of the DS screens, and Opera runs fine on those phones (you can download Opera Mini for your phone to test). Of course the compromises gets greater when the screens get smaller, and the smallest phone sizes are fairly cramped.