After seeing the video of the various people learning how to use the new Wii controller I started to think about how you would control the little Mii (your Nintendo avatar, that I think can be stored in your controller – I can see it now, kids are really going to start fighting over “their” controller because now it will be the case… I wonder if they will ever support bluetooth phones as well…) and as it turns out, you only control one element of the avatar. This is somewhat disappointing, but then again, it’s a nice demo of what can be done, and I’m sure it will be remedied in the future.
I also found some more information about Nintendo’s Channels. This could be the most interesting part of the experience if they can be customized beyond what Nintendo provides. Sony and Microsoft both want their console to be the center of the home, but with a few exceptions, I don’t think that the entire experience of the home is about playing games and watching movies. Granted that is a large part for many, but there are other things like school, news and weather (the last two are covered and the Internet Channel may be able to handle a bit of school in a pinch). Sight unseen, I think Nintendo, with Channels and the Opera browser will be the first to have the console play a meaningful role in the home knowledge management environment. Using web2.0, content can be retrieved and interacted with in the family space and then only for more intensive work would one have to move off to a traditional computing setup.
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