Nintendo Wii Fanboy

It was a big day for Nintendo fans. Not only did we get some great announcements out of a surprise conference in Japan, but we were greeted by the friendly blue glow when we were able to tear ourselves away from said news and actually look at our beloved consoles.

While exciting on the face, though, today's update ends up being less than thrilling. Much-needed keyboard functionality came to the Opera browser, but it's still limited, and the Wii remote must be used to navigate through text boxes. Take the average search form as an example; at the computer, most of the time, you can type in your search terms and hit enter -- or at the most, tab to the search button and then hit enter. No such luck with the Wii's browser. It's more like this:

1. Navigate to text box with Wii remote
2. Enter text on keyboard
3. Navigate to enter/search button with Wii remote
   
4. Profit. Very slow and awkward profit, but better than a poke in the eye with ye olde sharp stick.

All of this would have been great with the last update, but now it's a little disappointing. We can only hope that another update is soon to follow that makes keyboards a little more useful. For now, it seems best to continue to use the browser sparingly. It's great for showing off YouTube videos to friends from the comfort of your sofa, but for any high-powered browsing, chatting, or forum-hopping, we'll recommend you stick to your computer. Unless, of course, you want to check out Wii Fanboy. Then we're with you 100%.

Logitech announced today that they're planning a special Wii keyboard for use with the system and the Opera browser. We're gonna guess that it will look and function much like a keyboard (shocking!) and that it will be white. But wouldn't it be awesome if it included a pointer? It could be like this, but smaller. Now that we'd consider.

The Everybody Votes channel was updated as well, and we'll give anyone a shiny new nickel if they can tell us what's new. There may be a new background or something, but updates seem to be cosmetic at best. We'll say they're clearly great if we don't even notice! But maybe we'll spy the purported enhancements over time.

In the meantime, we would like to offer an illustrated (but not well) version of our adventures with the updated Internet Channel.


At last, dear friends, we can use the internet in our living rooms like civilized people, without a laptop perched upon our knees. Instead, we can sprawl out across the sofa, one shoe dangling, arm flung out so that we don't have to share, and alternate between a keyboard and a Wii remote.

Okay, so it's still a little unwieldy, but hey, baby steps.

After that joke search, I tried something real. Something exciting. Sonic! And hey, look at that new search bar. Spiffy.

Which of course led me straight to the recent megaton. Sonic in Smash Bros.! And there was much rejoicing. Except ... what's with the video? Hitting play yielded nothing, so I thought, well, let's check out another one. Maybe YouTube.

But alas, embedded YouTube videos left a big ol' blank space. Not attractive.

So of course, I went to YouTube, just in case videos were broken. You can see the keyboard here. Keyboards make typing fun.

They weren't! Whew, that's a sigh of relief. Must celebrate with some Zelda music videos.

And then a trip to NeoGAF, just to appreciate typing a little more. I like typing. Especially with a real keyboard.

All in all, this is a step in the right direction, but we need more. We need page down functionality, we need tabbing, and we need the enter key to work as more than just a line return. But we'll take this for now!

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in!]