[NTLK] OT: Nintendo DS as wifi scanner (was: Re: Public WiFi)

[reilly001os at aol.com]

I'm a little late to the party but I have the opera ds cart and I can testify that its a little disappointing. It does do limited HWR that can read printing, you write in two boxes, one character per box jumping back and forth. Not ideal hwr but it works surprisingly well. The most disappointing points are the slow load times (although its faster then the newt and plays nice with most modern non-flash sites) and the view modes. The first view mode reformats the screen for a column view and scrolls the page over the two screens much like a wap phone broswer, its called small screen rendering mode and it works pretty well but the overview mode is a disappointment. The overview mode shows an overview on one screen and a zoom view on the other, the catch is you can only scroll with the keys on the overview when its on the touch screen  so you can't have the overview on the regular screen and use the keypad to scroll while selecting links on the zoomed touch screen, you end up switching screens back and forth while using the stylus to scroll/select which works but isn't very efficient, it feels like they're forcing you to use the stylus just to use the stylus. I hear that the DSi browser is better (faster) but I don't know if they fixed the awkward overview mode but it is also free on the DSi so you can't be to critical :-) I'm not sure how big the homebrew scene is for the DSi yet though. If you happen to be trying to locate a DS browser cart I'm not sure how easy it will be since I read it was only on sale in north america for a few months (years ago) thanks to its sub par performance, remember if buying one used that it does require the extra memory gba expansion cart it originally came with (of which there's two versions, ds orginal and ds lite). Personally its better then nothing but its not my first choice of mobile web browsing device, to give you a better idea here's how I'd rate my mobile devices (that are smaller then a netbook) for browsing: 1. ipod touch (gold standard!), 2. Blackberry 8100 (os 4.5.0.181), 3. Nintendo DS lite, 4. Blackberry 7100i (os 4.2), 5. Newton UMP2000, although the two blackberries vary in performance based on cell signal strength and can easily trade spots with the ds if I'm in my basement. Hope that helps answer some Q's on the ds browser cart.

Joe Reilly