While those with Sony Playstation Portables can play movies and music, surf the web and browse through digital photo albums as well as play games, all Nintendo DS owners get is a crude wireless chat system.

In an apparent attempt to help level the playing field in this respect, Nintendo has released a web browser add-on for its popular portable gaming machine.

The DS is Wifi-ready, but there’s very little in the way of available memory (for caching images etc), so the Browser comes in the shape of two expansion cards – one standard DS card with the browser application on it and one Gameboy Advance-shaped gamepak with a bit of working-space memory.

There are two versions of the browser available – one for the original DS and one for the more recent DS Lite version of the console. The main difference is the shape of the memory pak.

The browser itself is based on Opera and is very simple to use. There’s a small row of familiar icons (Back, Forwards, Favourites, Settings etc.) along the bottom edge of the lower screen.

Pages can be viewed in either SSR Mode or Overview Mode.

The former squashes the page to fit the DS’s screen width, while Overview Mode presents a shrunk-down, full-width version of the page on the lower display, with a stylus-guided roving magnifier that zooms into a portion of the page and displays it in the top screen.

Appropriately for a Nintendo product, the browser can be password protected and features its own content filtering system. Stylus and touchscreen operation suits web browsing down to a tee and the optional handwriting recognition input system works surprisingly well.

On the whole, however, things are extremely sluggish (presumably thanks to the DS’s hardware limitations), and many multimedia aspects of web browsing that we take for granted (Flash, QuickTime, RealAudio) are, sadly, unsupported.

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