Brian's Brain

Three months ago, when I last covered Nintendo's Wii game console in depth, I was only able to put my grubby hands on it for a few days before I passed it on to Robert Cravotta, who shipped it back to the company after a few-day evaluation of his own. Thanks to Analog Devices (who, although a clueless journalist from another publication may have been coerced into thinking otherwise via selective disclosure, manufactures the motion sensor in the primary game controller aka the Wiimote) a Wii is once again temporarily inhabiting my living room. Aside from a brief perusal of WarioWare: Smooth Moves (I'll cut to the chase: don't waste your time or money on this one!) I've focused my attention so far on previously unexplored territory.

The console came with a now-out-of-date firmware revision installed. I proactively kicked off an update session after connecting the Wii to my wireless network; the download quickly got to ~75 percent complete, then briefly hung, then continued to approximately 95 percent complete, then hung again....with a 'do not power off console during update' message on-screen. Intimately familiar with the dangers of forcibly aborting an in-progress update from my flash memory days, I nervously twiddled my thumbs for a few hours. Then, resigned to the fact that the update was DOA and reassured after Googling around and reading the journals of others who'd had similar experiences, I power-cycled the Wii. It came back up just fine (phew!) and my second firmware update attempt completed with no issues. Apparently the Wii prefers to use Wi-Fi channel 1, whereas the nearest access point to my unit broadcasts on channel 6.

In part 2 of my three-week back, three-part PlayStation 3 writeup, I mentioned how underwhelmed I was with the PS3's browser. I'm happy to report that I'm much more impressed with the Opera-licensed beta browser that ironically became available on the Wii shortly after my last review's publication. As with the PS3's browser, you enter URLs and other input alphanumeric data in a character-by-character hen-peck manner; however, navigating around the pop-up keyboard (which unlike the PS3's, is full-sized) using the location-aware controller is much easier than repeatedly pressing buttons on the PS3's game controller. The Wii browser also does a good job of discerning between intended and unintended keyboard presses.

Befitting its Opera heritage, the Wii browser did an excellent job of rendering almost all of the numerous web pages I threw at it. You can navigate up and down within a page, as well as side-to-side if you've zoomed in, using the controller's motion-sensing capabilities in conjunction with a single-key press. Zooming in (to more easily read small-font text, for example, or to closely examine a portion of an image) and out within a page view are equally intuitive functions. I had good success viewing Flash-enabled sites, including those containing Flash video (yes, once again I giggled). And a whole slew of websites offer Flash-based games to entertain you.

Nintendo's also launched several new Channels to enhance the console's capabilities (the Shop Channel, for example, is where I downloaded the Wii Browser). The Forecast Channel, as its name implies, provides current weather and future forecast information after you enter your location details, as well as providing a global view (complete with a location- and time-accurate surrounding-star map) that lets you investigate weather conditions elsewhere. The weather data even feeds into some games' weather condition simulations, aka in Madden NFL '07.

However, rarely is the Sacramento current weather information less than several hours old, and I can't seem to find a way to proactively kick off a WiiConnect24 session. The News Channel is well organized and robustly outfitted but, I suspect, suffers from the same out-of-date traits as its Forecast sibling. I'd encourage Nintendo to beef up its servers' capabilities (whose current limitations, I'm guessing, are behind the existing infrequency-of-update schedule to each Wii) in order to provide more timely results. Minimally, Nintendo should provide users the ability to do an as-needed on-demand update; if such a feature already exists and I just haven't stumbled across it, please let me know.

Continue reading with 'Nintendo's Wii: Clever Accessories'....