Nintendo DS to Include the Palm OS?

[Luineancaion]

I have never used wap, but I've mucked around with a fancy sony phone that did web really well.

*EDIT* Rather I'm not sure if I've used wap, that thing on the sony phone might have been wap?

[17R3W]

Hang on....

My mother has a Pentuim 1 @ 75 mhz and uses IE, surley the DS is faster then that!
The DS has got much less memory (the comp came with 8MB, but now has 24MB) but surley the NDS can use some of the space on the cart for paging files (ect),

I realize the low res will be an issues but i can't see that NDS doesn't have the speed to run IE.
I think FireFox, wants 233mhz, but I gotta believe that it could run on much less (minus some bells and wistles). Decoding html may take some time (*XML would be much faster to do, assuming the DS can) but even so, I should think the DS could handle IE or Firefox.


*XML and HTML aren't the same thing, nore a replacement for each other

[Luineancaion]

Firefox, not IE.... firefox can easily be scaled down, well it wouldn't be firefox...... anyway, elinks with image support would be fine, and only windows has a page file, really operating systems have a dedicated swap partition ;)

[x999x]

17R3W, Luineancaion - Guys, you're missing the point, the DS doesn't have the available memory to run either of those browsers. It's not just the browser footprint, but also each footprint of each plugin required to run the page your viewing. To scale things down to fit within the DS's ram alottment, you remove features like a mini java virutal machine, flash compliance, and or animated images like gifs.

A pocketPC with 128 megs of ram cannot view the web as your desktop can, and that's on a machine designed to be web ready. It doesn't matter that your grandaddy's laptop can run firefox despite only having 16 megs of ram and windows 3.1, it's using a page file, aka virtual memory and is storing much of what it can't in ram on your hard disk. Portable devices don't run conventional OS' and everything that runs on them has to be ported and scaled down. Good luck trying to find ANYONE to do that who's not getting paid to do it, and paying for the license in the process.

Look, the BEST you'll ever get on the DS is subpar to what the best console browser ever released can handle, PlanetWeb version 3 for the dreamcast. The DS could run something similar, but even more scaled back, prolly nixing it's flash 4 support, and all of it's java functionality.

And yes, unless you hack your phone's mime settings to say it's a pc client, you're going to automatically be directed to wap web pages unless the site doesn't have any by default.

Edit- On a side note, if the DS does get PalmOS, it *does* have AvantGo functionality, which is light browsing that looks a lot better than wap. It's actually a cache of your favorite sites that gets updated for changes every time you sync. It can also be used to view pages when a connection is present. It's not pretty, but it works and is a heckuva lot better than WAP.

[Luineancaion]

Uhh if the DS can't run elinks then it can't run anything ;)

[x999x]

links on the xbox is really limited, I mean it's barely worth using for more than a wiki reader, and it has 64 megs of ram and an 8gig scratch disk :T

I just don't want people to get their hopes up for such a lavish mobile web experience, because it's not going to be. To imagine the DS could deliver a desktop like web browsing experience when everyone else who's tried has only been able to do so on a limited scale is very wishful thinking.

[Luineancaion]

Agreed, getting your hopes up would be very bad.... you'll be disapointed if you think it'll be anything like using a fully fledged browser.... I could still be useful for things like email though.

I didn't know the xbox had links... are we talking about the same thing? Text based browser, no images.

[chuddy_2001uk]

It would be good but very expensive imo anyway... I don't think its worth it, me.

[x999x]

Originally Posted by Luineancaion

Agreed, getting your hopes up would be very bad.... you'll be disapointed if you think it'll be anything like using a fully fledged browser.... I could still be useful for things like email though.

I didn't know the xbox had links... are we talking about the same thing? Text based browser, no images.

Yep, http://ysbox.online.fr/?pagename=LinksBoks.ScreenShots

Personally, I run GentooX on my xbox and just run Opera for browsing instead. It's a lot slower since I run a graphical KDE, but it's much closer to a full fledged browsing appliance than anything else on the market that's not an actual computer/desktop.

[Luineancaion]

Originally Posted by x999x

Yep, http://ysbox.online.fr/?pagename=LinksBoks.ScreenShots

Personally, I run GentooX on my xbox and just run Opera for browsing instead. It's a lot slower since I run a graphical KDE, but it's much closer to a full fledged browsing appliance than anything else on the market that's not an actual computer/desktop.

I guess you have a keyboard for the xbox or something? You should emerge fluxbox and run that, it'll run a hell of a lot faster as it doesn't need anywhere near the memory that kde requires.