Mike Bantick
Saturday, 27 January 2007 05:32
Opinion and Analysis
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The Wii concept of channels has born new fruit with the introduction of the News Channel to the Nintendo game console. I have downloaded and had a "play" with the new offering.
Activating the Wii News Channel will give you the familiar look and sound of Nintendo's Channel concept, and take you to a text category based index for stories. (You will need broadband Internet and the trial Opera web browser on your Wii before the new channel will install)
You can from there choose Associated Press content from a number of typical News categories; Sport, Art, Entertainment and so on, updated continually. Mine said that the last update was 1 hour and 3 minutes ago, which seem a little lengthy in my book, but it is only the first day, so we will see if this frequency changes.
National and Regional News stories were also available, although being in Melbourne Australia, stories seem to be light on at the moment, unless you follow the Tennis or Cricket.
Stories are presented in two distinct formats, one for general worldwide interest stories, presented like a newspaper page with a slightly disturbing zoom feature to make the text larger or smaller. The text breaks apart and reforms at the new zoom level.
The other format is similar, but has a map taking up around 1 third of the screen to show the locale of the story.
Occasionally there may be an associated photo accompanying the story.
Eventually you will feel the need to give the Globe a spin, with the same God like interface you may have used with Google Earth or more relevantly, the Forecast Channel currently available on the Wii.
The Forecast Channel enables you to look at weather around the World. The News Channel gives you the same ability to jet set around and select stories, stacked like piles of paper of differing sizes depending on zoom level and available content.
It is a simple interface using the Wii-mote to select, zoom and scroll through news. In my mind it works elegantly with only a few nagging questions to be sorted in my mind.
