Nintendo DS Browser review

It doesn’t matter whether you’re ever going to use them – it is written in the ‘Book of Gadgets’ that just about every games console has to have a web browser.

The PSP has one, so obviously Nintendo’s cute little DS has had to join the battle. It’s done so in the form of a cart that lets you hop onto the web via DS-only USB browser hotspots, public hotspots and even private ones.

Dual-screen surfing

It all starts off pretty well with Nintendo’s browser – the ‘overview’, where one screen on your DS shows you a detail of the page and the other renders the whole page as you might see it on a PC, is a pretty neat use of the hardware.

And it’s all neatly laid out in a Nintendo-esque fashion, with big, no-nonsense icons that do everything from letting you enter URLs via soft keyboard, to adding a ‘.co.uk’ with one touch.

Flash howler

As ever with Opera, it renders pages pretty sensibly – but the omission of Flash is an absolute howler, and some pages simply don’t work. Including, annoyingly, some pages that are trying to let you onto Wi-Fi networks. It’s also not very fast, no matter what you’re looking at.

Stick to networks you know, and simple web pages such as news, emails and Google searches, and you’ll be fine. It’s just that, in any self-respecting nerd’s manbag, there are probably four or five other gadgets that can do the web far, far better than this.