At around 2:30AM Central Standard Time, the Wii store began allowing United States residence to download the long awaited Opera browser. This came straight off the heals of our Aussie Report, the US Wii owners can now download the Opera browser Free of charge! Lets just hope this lasts.
New Screens:
The download process was fairly simple, and the browser can be found in the Wii Shop under the Wii Ware category. You will not need to update your system in order to see it.
Once the browser is downloaded, you are done! All we had to do was go back to the main Wii menu and the Internet Channel was already there. It clearly states that the browser was a Free Trail so I suspect this download has some sort of timed DRM on it.
Using the browser was fairly simple. Although typing out long addresses, even 2old2play's, was kind of a hassle. The other odd thing was our 16:9 Toshiba plasma caused huge black bars on each side of the browser (see screen shots), almost as if it was stuck in a black box. While its not to big of a problem, it does make the whole thing a little less professional looking.
Viewing a site is a snap. You can scroll by holding down the "B" button to grab the page, and move the Wii mote up or down. Actually reading the text may prove to be a little more difficult. If you have a Hi-Def screen, we HIGHLY suggest purchasing (if you can find them) the component cables. Without them, words just tend to mush together. Even with the handy Zoom feature (activated by pressing the "+" button) the words just don't look as good until you plug in the component cables.
Most of the other features are kept fairly sparse. There is a favorites tab for adding the sites you request. Given that you have to type everything in with the Wii Mote, this has proven to be invaluable. Other then that, you seem to be left with a low resolution browser that renders pages fairly well. Even YouTube and other flash pages worked great (check out YouTubes full screen options).
The real questions will be, is this browsers worth the money it will soon cost to download? So far we would have to say no. For anyone that already has a computer in the house, we found the navigation and poor resolution a little too impractical to stop us from simply getting off the couch and walking into the office. By the time you actually boot up the browser, you can most likely be sitting at your desk and surfing the web in full resolution glory. Still, its nice to see a browser within the Wii. To bad the Xbox doesn't have one yet for the 360. 1080i makes a lot more sense when browsing the web.
More Info From Nintendo: Opera Browser Announcement
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