I got the chance to check out the Opera web browser for the Wii this morning – what Nintendo is calling the Internet Channel, and here are some initial impressions after trying it out for about 10 minutes.
Scrolling is performed by pointing in one direction and holding down B, and how fast it scrolls depends on how close to the edge of the screen you’re pointing. This works pretty well. Most sites are too wide though, forcing you to scroll horizontally as well as veritcally. By default, text is very small and hard to read, at least with standard AV cables; I’m sure S-video or component will sharpen this up greatly, but it’s still very tiny by default. There is a zoom feature, however, which works well. Entering URL’s is easy enough, but the on-screen keyboard should have additional virtual keys for TLD’s: .com, .net, .org. Finally, although you can add/edit/delete favorite websites, I couldn’t seem to find an option to change anything but the display name when editing a favorite; it seems that if a URL changes, you’d have to delete the old one and re-add it, which seems silly to me.
All in all, a promising start. It works well for what it is, although improvements can (and should) be made. I look forward to being able to play Flash-based games within the browser from my couch.