Arukeh wrote:
The Great 5iN wrote:
From a current hardware and firmware standpoint, it's impossible. The device simply does not have the hardware capabilities to make it an enjoyable experiance, and the firmware does not support any methods to attempt to offset that. We're a long ways off from internet capabilities. Maybe in the 3.X era we'll see it, but not before then.
Dude, i'm sorry to say, you're wrong. The closest i've seen to a Zune internet browser was the ZIM app on Zune boards. However, the wifi and the Zune hardware/firmware combo is fully capable of handling a web browser. The only things missing would be a logical keypad, but with 2nd gen Zunes and they're innovative touch pad, it wouldn't be that hard to incorporate a mouse, and a keyboard that you can enter letters and symbols with much the same way you can on ZIM. It would be completely capable of handling a watered down version of a browser without flash or Java integration(Lame, i know, but still progress nonetheless...) much like the Opera browser for the DS.
AdHoc texting is significantly different from a web browser. The best the Zune would be able to do with it's current hardware is the horribly stripped down Mobile Web that you see on crappy cell phones. Simply put, any data on a web page that you visit would be stored in the RAM memory of the device. As the Zune only has maybe, 32 megs of RAM, the device would have to do a RAM dump between every web page in order to keep the device from crashing. You home PC keeps information stored in it's RAM memory to keep load times down (such as Google's logo). Now, due to lack of RAM space, every Google page you went to (including each search result page), the device would have to download the image over and over again. This causes load times to be EXTREMELY slow. Now, you COULD allocate some of the hard drive as temporary RAM. However, these hard drives are no where near as fast as RAM and add additional time as the drive spins up, finds, and reads the data on the hard disk before it goes to the processor.
This doesn't even factor in potential security vunerabilities, hardware failures due to additional stress to the hard disk, and keeping the software's RAM usage low enough to not greatly impact the browsing experiance.
And citing the Nintendo DS and it's Opera browser as an example is a weak argument, as the DS is significantly more powerful "under the hood" in comparison to the Zune.
Instead of focusing on an internet browser, why not focus on the ability to access the Zune Marketplace and download files directly to the Zune via WiFi? This would be significantly less intense on the Zune, and would be a more practical feature.
