Last night, the buzz was spreading throughout all the usual Internet forums: Nintendo was holding a press conference to announce new DS products in Japan. Rumors started flying -- would Nintendo unveil an online Pokemon? A touch-screen Zelda?
As it turns out, the truth isn't as exciting -- although a few small game-related announcements were made, the Big Reveal of the day was that a TV tuner and Opera web-browsing software would soon be available for the hardware.
Yeah, you can already browse the Web on PSP, for free -- Sony included a web browser in their latest firmwae updates. But I found it pretty clunky when I tried it; browsing the web and typing using a joystick isn't my idea of user-friendly. The DS promises to sport a much nicer interface -- the entire web page will be shown on the bottom screen, and you can drag your viewing window around for a zoomed-in picture.
Where it might be rendered totally useless is if the DS' screen resolution just isn't up to par; squinting at tiny words and having to drag a view-screen around might not be the most user-friendly web experience either. But with however many millions of installed DS units in Japan (and with another practically guaranteed one million over the next month and a half as the anticipated DS Lite finally launches), both of these devices could end up selling well.
A web browser, at least, would probably be a likely candidate to be brought over to the US market. TV tuner, I'm not so sure about -- does anybody even watch network TV anymore?
