Does anyone (this is mostly for, but not restricted to, any Portuguese readers) reading this know of a Portuguese-language equivalent of PRWeb, a site to which you can (by paying some amount of money) send a press release, which is then picked by many news sites and aggregators?
Thanks in advance.
P.S. - this is related to my new Nintendo forum, in case you’re curious. See, full disclosure. 
This is likely to be of interest only to Portuguese readers, but since there are a bunch of them reading this through Prt.Sc, here goes…
A couple of days ago, NintendoPT, the biggest Nintendo-related forum in Portugal, closed down. I was already thinking (see here if you don’t believe me) about expanding my Nintendo DS forum, NDS-PT, either to add the Wii as an “equal partner console”, or to expand it to a full Nintendo forum, but was inclined toward the former because I didn’t want to compete directly with NintendoPT. But since the latter is no more, there is a big gap to fill, and…
… I am pleased to announce the transformation of NDS-PT into NintenForum-PT, possibly the biggest Nintendo forum in Portugal nowadays. More than 500 members, more than 16000 posts, and no longer invaded by Pokémon fans (who scared many of the NDS-PT old timers away in February, but who then moved en masse to a separate Pokémon forum).
The Tlog is proud (well, I am; the blog isn’t sentient, at least not yet…) to be aggregated there. If, like me, you have a Google News alert for “wii”, yesterday and today you’ve surely been inundated with rumors about a forthcoming announcement at E3 for a hard drive for the Nintendo Wii. Its main use would be for Virtual Console games, since the Wii only has 512 MB of flash memory for them (you can move some to an SD card, but they aren’t directly playable from there).
Their justification? The fact that some time ago it was announced that Neo Geo games would be coming to the Wii, and, as they keep saying, “Neo Geo games can use up to 330 MB”.
Really?
I’m betting they’re taking that number from the Neo Geo common intro screen (you can see it using MAME, on older games), which says “MAX 330 MEGA”.
However, those are not megabytes, but megaBITS. 330 megabits = about 41 megabytes. Still bigger than all current virtual console games, but not more than half of the Wii’s flash memory.
Amazingly, I’ve seen about a dozen news sites repeating that mistake. It seems that nobody researches anything these days; “news reporting” is simply repeating what others already said, using different words so that it looks “original”.
Incidentally, the 330 megabits Neo Geo limit was passed some years ago. The biggest Neo Geo game I have on MAME (King of Fighters 2003) is about 100 megabytes (or 800 megabits).
Well, I’ve had it for a couple of days now. As far as I know, it hasn’t yet been released in Portugal, but I ordered it from Amazon.co.uk.
If you’ve used Opera Mobile version 8.x, you have an idea of what to expect, as the browser (while it has the “Opera” brand, it’s referred to as “Nintendo DS Browser”) is mostly the same, with the necessary changes for the different hardware, naturally.
The biggest problem, in my opinion, is this: it’s a bit slow. Not unbearably so, but scrolling is far from smooth, especially on more complex pages. It also loads and renders them slower than you’re probably used to, even with a fast connection. It’s usable, sure, but it’s far from the experience of using Firefox on a PC, of course. In fact, Opera in my Nokia 6630 is faster than this one (but, then, modern cell phones are more powerful, hardware-wise, than a DS).
The browser has two vieweing modes: Small Screen Rendering mode (SSR), and Overview mode. The first works mostly like the mobile version: it ensures that you never have to scroll horizontally, by making every frame / column appear on top of each other. You can read pages perfectly, but you lose a lot of the formatting. One problem is that in sites with a menu on the left, the entire menu appears before the content, which means you have to scroll down a lot to start reading. Anyway, this mode is perfectly fine for reading blogs, for instance, but a forum (such as a phpBB one) is more complicated.
Overview mode shows the entire page with the original formatting. You see a “zoomed out” version on one of the screens, and a zoomed in section on the other. You can drag the zoomed in part with the stylus, of course. This way, you can see a site with its original look, but navigation becomes more difficult.
Personally, I stay in SSR mode most of the time, except when a site really requires its original formatting. One interesting example is GameKnot, an online chess server. With Overview mode and maximum zoom out, you can actually have the entire chess board on the clickable screen, and make your moves with the stylus! I’ve tried it and it works, which shows that Javascript support is acceptable.
You can write using a virtual keyboard, in the same way you write your name in a game, or use handwriting recognition. I didn’t like the latter; maybe it’s because I’m used to my old Palm, which recognizes characters differently. Many times, it didn’t recognize the letter I typed, and I’ve found no way to write accented characters. Anyway, the virtual keyboard works quite well, and you can certainly write faster than using T9 in a cell phone.
One problem, though: maybe it’s because this is the UK version, instead of a localized Portuguese one, but, as far as I can see, there is no way to write vowels like A and O with a tilde, like “ã” or “õ”. The browser shows them perfectly in pages, but they’re not available on the virtual keyboard. You can select which national keyboard you want (US, UK, SP, etc.), but there’s no Portuguese one. Maybe it’ll be available when (and if) they release the browser here. It’s not the end of the world, but it can be annoying if you want to use it for writing or commenting in Portuguese sites or blogs.
Personally, I use this browser mostly for reading in bed (blogs and other sites). It’s much more comfortable to use the small, light DS than a comparatively huge and heavy laptop. And I don’t currently have one of those, anyway.
No Java or Flash, but I don’t miss them.
It saves bookmarks and the browser configuration to the card, but not cookies or files. Cookies are lost when you turn the DS off, which means that you have to log in again in any site you access. A little annoying, but, as I said, you can write usernames and passwords quickly using the virtual keyboard.
So far, it hasn’t crashed once.
There are two versions, one for the old DS (”Phat”), and another for the DS Lite. The reason is that the browser comes with a memory expansion, which is inserted into the GBA port, and they include a smaller one for the DS Lite, which doesn’t stick out of the port (like GBA games do). The Phat version works on both DSs (sticking out of the GBA port on the Lite), but the Lite version is for the Lite only.
Curiously, this isn’t out in the US yet… one of the few times us Europeans got a better deal.
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