Watered Down Surfing With The Internet Channel By Nick Vervoort on Mar 01, 2008 - Updated Oct 15, 2011

The Wii Internet Channel is an interesting addition to the Wii Menu. It lets you surf the internet from the comfort of your own couch; with accessible built-in search, smart-zoom, and Flash player, it seems like a solid deal from the start.

There are a few problems though. The Internet Channel doesn't allow plugins of any kind to be installed, meaning that you are stuck with Flash for multimedia. Navigation with the Wii Remote works well enough, but there I times where I wish I had features such as scroll bars, and a Find feature for within a page. Of course, web-scripting is supported, which means that if you want to browse forums or blogs (or SharedReviews), you're free to do so. Overall, I've had the Wii Browser come in handy when I couldn't be at my computer for one reason or another.

One important highlight is that the latest version of the Internet Channel allows you to use a USB keyboard for typing rather than the Wii Keyboard (Which for small blocks of text is lovely, but I shudder to think of writing something like this using it). In closing, the Wii Internet Channel may be worth the five dollars to you, but it really depends on how close in proximity your Wii is to your computer. If you want internet in all corners of your home, then by all means buy it; but if your Wii uses your computer screen as its monitor, then you would be better off using the regular internet. The choice is yours!