Nintendo just announced that the Internet Channel browser (powered by Opera) has reached its final form. This browser is optimized for the Wii and contains several improvements over the last Beta release, including better search support for Yahoo! and Google.
According to Wikipedia here is what’s new since the preview release:
- Improved zooming and scrolling.
- An improved zoomed font.
- Shortened startup times.
- Quicker access to “favorites”. Up to 48 favorites can now be saved.
- An ability to hide the toolbar (auto-hide and button press).
- Built-in Yahoo! and Google search functions.
- Improved Wii Remote navigation.
- Parental Controls and Content Filtering.
- New cursor animations and operation sounds.
- Option to Delete Cookies.
- Built-in Support Manual.
- Improved display settings, allowing the whole screen to be used while the wii is set to 16:9 mode.
- Page information
- Ability to enter website addresses from the toolbar
- The ability to use more than one wii-remote as pointers
The full version of Internet Channel is freely available until June 30, 2007 at which time it will cost you 500 Wii points to purchase. Every 100 Wii points is $1 so the Opera-powered browser will run you a whopping $5 which is surprisingly a reasonable price.
So for all of you Wii owners out there…head on over and download the latest release of Internet Channel while you can get it for free!
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I downloaded it this morning and wasn’t too impressed with the upgrade. I mean, we could have easily searched using google.com (instead of a search button that’s now there), and the only thing I liked was the auto-hide of the bottom toolbar.
To Opera,
We want tabs!
Signed,
Everyone (I think) who uses the internet channel.
I haven’t tried out the software myself, but I didn’t realize that it doesn’t include tabs. That really surprises me because almost all of Opera’s other browsers have some sort of tabbed interface to make browsing the Web that much better. Maybe they are going to wait until it isn’t free anymore and then release an update, that way there will be a big feature to entice people to actually purchase it.
Well I got the update yesterday, and I used it for a good amount of time. I like it very much and it does have a lot of improvements over the trial (beta) version. I like the fact I don’t need to go to the start page every single time to type in an web address, and also I like the fact that it does have search button. But there are no tabs, which is a miss on my chart but it’s ok. I use to watch you tube videos and music videos with the auto hiding of the toolbar makes the whole video full screen which really cool. Thanks Opera and Nintendo.
I was wondering whether you could automatically hide the toolbars because they would take up a lot of room otherwise. I’m sure they are working on getting tabs into it thought.