Nintendo DS Browser (Nintendo DS Lite)

This DS web browser was never going to make me want to ditch the laptop but for £25 it does a good job. You can check your e-mail or how the shares are doing while sat in a delay at the airport/train station etc with minimal of fuss. My DS was unused in my drawer until I got this but now keep it in my briefcase and have used it a few times lately when I needed to check up on something. Can't grumble at all.

not what expected

I was curious about this - and although the product arrived on time, and in perfect condition, you genuinely just do not want to own this piece of software for your DS. I'm massively confused why it's so dysfunctional when this and the DSi are not different in processing power, but the latter has an in-built browser which is far more optimised. Pros - This was cheap. Cons - Slowest browser you may ever use (My Raspberry Pi using Chromium, and over a 99p WiFi dongle, can load a webpage faster than this) - Often more expensive than this - Genuinely not worth the investment

I bought this software to be able to check my emails and carry out banking when I'm on the move. However, despite reading reviews that indicated I could do this, I can't access any https site, including windows live mail. As others have commented, it is incredibly slow - I could live with this if I ultimately reached the site that I wanted to but unfortunately that has never happened. So if this is what you want the product for, I should forget it.

I had reservations about buying this, since I had so many bad experiences with similar products in the past (creating a good web browser with restrictions on screen size and memory is non-trivial). When I was nudged into the purchase by necessity however, I was pleasantly surprised. Two solutions have been adopted to solve the low screen resolution problem, both of which work well and can be switched between fairly quickly to suit the page you're viewing. The default viewing mode is called SSR and involves the software intelligently moving things on the page around so you don't have to scroll to the right. The other mode is called Overview, which uses the top screen for viewing a zoomed in section of the bottom screen. The zoomed in area is selected with the stylus on the bottom screen. Pages load fairly quickly for a mobile device with such little memory (obviously the included memory pack helps here). digg.com, which is a moderately heavy site, loads in about 38 seconds. You're free to view the already loaded elements of the page as the rest are loading. Certainly, I couldn't say that loading times are painful. Flash/multimedia content does not work, as that would require a lot more processing power and memory than the DS has. Some images seem to be downgraded. For example, Penny Arcade comics are unreadable. Though this could be unique to Penny Arcade (since I haven't noticed it on any other sites) I thought it was worth mentioning anyway. The question you probably most want answered is that of Gmail, and yes, it works. Though chatting is disabled (as in Safari). Text entry is also available in two flavours; traditional touch keyboard, or character recognition. I found the character recognition route to be a little slower than using the keyboard, but it's at least as accurate as other character recognition software I've used. Typing out URLs is helped by shortcut buttons you can assign to things like ".com" and "[...]". It's definitely a usable browser, and handy to have with you, even at home. I use it at night when I'm reading in bed to look up words on dictionary.com. As far as browsers for mobile devices (with small screens) go, this is most likely the best you'll get.

I bought this on a whim as well. But I cannot agree it is slow. I found it very easy to connect to my wireless network. I only have a 1mb Tiscali Broadband connection as we live outside London. If you try to view the BBC website for instance then yes it takes a few seconds. But why do that? There are plenty of Mobile or PDA versions of popular websites, including a very good BBC version and also Ebay, and these are very quick. I find this browser a lot of fun and I use it all the time. A brilliant little device. Try it.

this is one of the best gadgets i have bought in a long time, allows me to accsess all the things i want like email, bank accounts, ebay, amazon etc. yes it is slow and no you can't watch videos but anyone expecting more on the ds is daft. even with broadband some pages can be a little slow sometimes, but remeber when we was on dial-up it could take ages for a page to load so to criticise the small ds for this is not fair. i do not have a lap top so it is great being able to look at things in another room or in bed so for anyone like myself it is highly reommended.

This is a fun little item to use for nintendo lovers. However it has quite a few faults: 1.you cant go onto yahoo because it's an 'outdated browser' 2. you can not go onto youtube because it doesn't support movies 3. it only accepts routers with wep security or no security, so you cannot use wpa or wpa2 4. it only accesses about 1/3 of the internet 5. It isnt powerful enough, even with the memory expansion It still is ok for things like research etc... but overall, not recommended If I were you, just get an ipod.

Too cumbersome.