When was the last time you PAID for a browser?

I just did, I spent 500 Wii points for the Opera browser (http://www.opera.com/products/devices/nintendo/), for those of you new to this currency it translates to $5/- USD. Sadly for those folks who ended up buying their Wii after July 2007, the browser is no longer free.

So far my surfing has been primarily to watch ‘Youtube’ (I could not play the streams on Veoh or metacafe) videos from the comfort of my couch with the Wiimote controller, compose an e-mail and other light weight tasks. It did freeze once and had to rebooted to get it up and running again. It could be related to some of the streaming content I was trying to watch. With its small memory (512 MB) and an older flash version (version 7) on Opera, my Web surfing will be limited to smaller flash videos that is until I have enough time to wade through over 840 posts on “How to upgrade the Wii memory” on Yahoo! answers

Clearly most Web Sites aren’t geared for their Wii users and the long delay in getting these consoles suggests that the companies have plenty of time to catch up (Only ~ 20 million Wii sold, of which only ~8 million are in US source http://www.vgchartz.com/). That is assuming there are people who buy Wii and get bored (exhausted ? oh many for sure) of their games to go online.

With Wii’s growing social network and user base, it will not be too long before the user wants to check out the Second life avatar of his buddy’s Mii (the Wii Avatar for the uninitiated)