[quote name='espy605']Hey Oops, so if you log into say Yahoo Mail, you can read your mail right? How easy is it to actually write email? Is the interface handwriting recognition similar to Palm's Graffiti? Or is it a touch-type thing?[/quote]
Yup, you can read your mail. I don't use Yahoo Mail, never tried it on the DS, but I've used Hotmail and Gmail just fine.
I've never used Palm's Graffiti writing interface, but I can say that the DS Opera writing interface is simply and pretty darn effective: there are two blocks for quick writing, you can hit a radio-button to determine whether the software should look out for letters or numbers/characters, then you write one letter in one box then another in the next box and you can do it seamlessly as the software detects it at around a .5 second delay. As I alluded to earlier, I've never used touch-screen writing recognition before, but I find this to be more responsive than I imagined. There are a couple of letters I sometimes have trouble with, but all in all, that works.
There is also the option, as you said, of a keypad being on screen where you just touch a letter for it to be inserted. There are also either four or five (I forget off the top of my head) buttons with common top-level domains (.com, .net, .org, .co.uk, etc) which very much comes in handy. They're customizable, so I figure you can put pretty much whatever you want there, though I have not bothered with that. I've found this keypad option to be significantly faster, overall.
You can also use the stylus to select a portion of text in either the URL bar or a form field and replace what's selected, or point directly to an insertion point, etc...that's great, though I'm sure it's standard to folks who are familiar with touch-screen devices, as I am not (beyond DS).
If you turn off graphics, does it load pages really fast?
It never loads pages REALLY fast (it can get kinda fast, but it's not as fast as our PCs), but it certainly helps. Basically, disabling images allows you to browse pages a lot more quickly and seamlessly.
When you're browsing an image-intensive site in Zoom mode (with one screen showing a zoomed in selection of the entire as-seen-on-a-PC resolution version on the other screen), it can feel very clunky to try to browse before all of the images have loaded. When images are disabled, it moves noticeably smoother and does not take nearly the amount of time to finish loading everything.
When you're browsing an image-intensive site in the Small Screen Rendering mode (where the entire page is seen zoomed in through both screens, but with background images in pages/tables disabled and colums in tables simply placed one on top of the other to allow for easier navigation/reading), the sites pretty much always navigate fairly fast, images or no images - i.e., you can scroll up and down without the sluggish feeling, for the most part. When you turn off images, it gets better, but the performance is acceptable enough with images on to where it feels almost like a negligible change in SSR mode.
