Believe it or not, I'm typing this from my Nintendo Wii. But it's rather slow so I'm going to stop now and come back to this blog later, and write it from my PC.

UPDATE: Ok, so I'm back at my PC to give my impression of Opera for the Wii.  So far, it's pretty good in that it functions and is usable.  It does appear to be kinda slow, but renders pages exactly the same as it's PC sibling.  In fact, it even reproduces the rendering glitch you can see often on the deviantART website.  That aside, there is room for improvement.

The browser has a start page where you can choose to open a favourited [sic] web page, or  enter a url.  You always have to return to this page to go to a new web site, unless you have it saved as a favourite.  I would prefer to be able to enter a URL without having to return to this page.  And I think there should be an option to do a search from this page also as I know a lot of people who only ever use search and have no idea what the address bar in a browser is for.

Web pages have two zoom levels.  Zoomed out, I can't read a thing on my 68cm CRT.  But zoomed in everything is very legible and a well designed page should display well at this level of zoom.  Even though I can't read anything zoomed out, it still gives a nice overview of the page to help me navigate.

Scrolling the webpage is done by holding 'B' moving your cursor to the sides of the screen to scroll in that direction.  Much like the middle mouse button works on PC-based web browsers.  This is a method of control Nintendo seem to have pushed for a couple of their channels, but I think the unused directional pad might be a more intuitive way to scroll.  Perhaps they could have both.

I'm not sure what features are planned, but you can currently only browse one page at a time.  It would be nice to have tabs of some sort.  And you can't see the URL of the page you are visiting.

Text entry is really simple for short spurts of text, and people who use SMS will feel right at home with the predictive text and mobile-like keypad.  There is also a full keyboard for typing, but I think less keys is better.

But the text entry seems to have a glitch in that you can't type uppercase letters in the middle of a word.  Which can make typing password difficult.  But you can get around it by putting a space before the uppercase character then deleting it after you've finished typing.  Typing you're password using this interface also means that everyone can see it until you've closed the keyboard.

Form entry works really well, even for complicated forms such as the one I use to blog on this site with (although tinyMCE doesn't work).  You click a field and it display the keyboard.  Although I noticed with one web page, as soon as the page loads a text field gets focus, and I had to remove focus from that field and then give it back before Opera would display the keyboard.

Opera will also display server generated prompts for passwords - you know, the ones that appear in their own dialog box. 

I don't yet know how popups are handled since I can't think of any sites that use popups.  I assume you don't get popups at all, but maybe there is a prompt to let you know another page is trying to open?

Unfortunately Opera for Wii doesn't have Quicktime but it will play YouTube videos fine.  I hope they can include Quicktime as I would love to be able to watch movie trailers on my TV.  It seems to have flash support, but Linerider wouldn't work.

Opera for Wii is in Beta so the issues I've seen so far are more than forgivable.  And lack of functionality could probably be expected as I don't think anyone will use their TV for any serious web browsing sessions.  My biggest complaint is the amount of time it took to download.  It seemed to take a lot longer than Mario 64.

If there is something you would like me to test, leave a comment.