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:
- Navigate to text box with Wii remote
- Enter text on keyboard
- Navigate to enter/search button with Wii remote
- 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.
Okay, so it's still a little unwieldy, but hey, baby steps.
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!]
1. I have to say i don't mind the way you enter searches with the wii because i am a great shot and its not that bad.
Posted at 8:02PM on Oct 10th 2007 by ELIJAH