Nintendo Wii

The Nintendo Wii is a wonderful and flawed technology wonder. If you are one of the lucky ones who has gotten your hands on this game system be happy. For those who are waiting for one good luck. Like all great companies Nintendo made the right choices. Upfront it seems pretty cheap but the expenses mount as you get into the game play. The initial purchase of the system with one controller, some software and a few multi-player games will cost you about $265. You will want to spend another $40 for a second controller, plus $20 more for the controller attachment. This will give you a very nice 2 player setup. You might want addittional controllers for up to 4 players, but you can get by with just 2. I'm happy SD Memory cards can be found for so cheap. The Nintendo brand cards will cost you extra, at about $20 for 1 GB. Additional games cost around $50. Though some games like the very cool Resident Evil 4 are only $30. In this case it is because the game was made for the GameCube system but it is a very good port and the new controller makes it worth it. Speaking of GameCube, I'm very happy I can play my old games on this system, you can use your old memory cards and GameCube controllers. Not only that but if you have a wireless router you can hop on the internet and buy classic games from all the the previous nintendo systems as well as some Sega games and TurboGrafx-16 games. Nintendo continues to update the library. Games must be purchased with wii points and 100 points equals $1. To browse the internet you will need to purchase the $5 web browser. It's pretty fun to sit back and watch videos on YouTube. However I am still waiting for someone to master web browsing from the couch. Hopefully Apple's FrontRow will one day make this happen. The console can also communicate and connect with other Wii systems through a self-generated wireless LAN, enabling local wireless multiplayer on different television sets. Battalion Wars 2 first demonstrated this feature for non-split screen multiplayer between two or more televisions. The one thing I'd like to see in a game system is the ability to store all the games on it. Ideally the system would have a hard drive and all games could be downloaded from the internet. It seems that the wii would be perfect for such a system, but lacks the memory space for large games. The system has built in 512 mb of flash memory and takes SD memory cards up to 2 GB. This brings up another issue I have. You can not play DVD movies on the Wii. And to play them it requires more than a firmware upgrade. I would have also liked to have 1080p output but most people do not have the TV for that anyway. All these things will be fixed when it can make Nintendo money I'm sure.

My original plan was to wait for a black system to come out. Everything is white and I have to wonder how clean they are going to stay. Nintendo has shown the console and the Wii Remote in white, black, silver, lime green and red, but it is currently available only in white. Shigeru Miyamoto stated that other colors would be available after the easing of supply limitations.

I have to say I love the glowing blue light on the front of the system. Yet you only get to see it when you put in a disc and when the system is updating it's software. Overall this is a fun system for groups of people and some strong single player games as well. Hopefully more multiplayer games come out this Christmas. This is where the console really shines.

Sexy Hardware

The design and options on this new Hard Drive from Western Digital are beautiful. Check out this post about it on www.tuaw.com

Beautiful Reality

1stAveMachine has Amazing CGI and design. Even Minneapolis musician Dosh is featured on one of the videos.

Free TV

I'm already paying the cable company for access, why can't you just watch TV on my PC? There are people out there working on this now, my guess is that Google will win the war. For now there is Neave.tv

HD Format Future

The future is flash memory. You will download content to a flash drive or buy a flash drive. While Blue-ray and HD DVD fight it out, long before a winner emerges, they will both lose to Highspeed internet. Currently speeds are not fast enough for High-Definition downloads to really excite me but soon enough we will have acceptable speeds. I imagine your iPhone for example would show you all the movies and music you could want and you would download it to the massive flash drive on your phone. Commercials and food menus will pop up when you are in the appropriate locations.

Windows XP theme. Dark Material.

I have always wondered why there was only 3 Windows XP Theme colors. I hate them all. I spent a lot of time searching for answers. A lot of "smart" people claimed you can change the colors, but this is only true in the windows classic theme, not in XP. Eventually I found the holy grail.

http://www.istartedsomething.com/20061029/royale-noir/

This Windows XP Zune Theme is also pretty cool:
click to download it.
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=75078

Apple TV and the fate of mac mini

The Mac mini's end is near. It would cost too much for it to take advantage of OS X 10.5 the Apple TV has replaced it in many ways or will.

YouTube is the mp3 napster of the video world, the Apple TV is the true video iPod.

Features from the Mac mini and the iPhone will start to trickle into the Apple TV as it upgrades. The goal will be a living room media center that can be simply controlled with a remote or hand gestures. Beating Microsoft surface to the punch.

Consider the evolution of the iPod and the iMac. Apple's philosophy is to use older hardware in a pretty package with easy to use functions. It begins as a striped down version, and slowly adds old features that seem new. ex. the iPod, late to the mp3 player scene, the iMacs stripped down, no disc drives etc., iPod Nano, same as the mini but with less memory, the iPhone has limited memory and no support for 3rd party software, the Apple TV again limited HD space slowly increasing with upgrades.

On a side note I'm curious to know how the Apple Hi-Fi is doing, I had to look it up because I forgot what it was called and then had to look for it on the web site, hidden away.