This past weekend I finally managed to find a Nintendo Wii. I have to say that the control scheme is pure genius. Being able to play golf, tennis, bowling, etc. the same way you do in real life is fantastic. The best part about this new system is my wife is totally hooked. Not since bringing home Tivo 6 years ago has she loved one of my tech gadgets so much. And just like when we got Tivo, she may end up being one of the Wii’s biggest advocates.
As I’ve played with the system more, there is one thing I’d love to see Nintendo do. That would be opening up the Wii channels to third-party developers. The Nintendo channels which range from useless, the new voting channel, to fun, the news and weather channels, can be good but it’s unclear if Nintendo will continue to make them better. For example, I’d like to see the weather channel provide more information such hour-by-hour or at least day-afternoon-night forecasts. Does Nintendo plan do make these channel better or do they consider them finished once they are available to all customers? I’d also love to have a media center channel that connected to by NAS (file server). Right now I’m experimenting with using the Wii browser for this but a channel would be more user friendly. The photo channel has potential but is limited by its SD card requirement.
Nintendo has the potential for a huge hit here but I don’t think they can accomplish this on their own. Hopefully they’ll open the system up to third party developers who can make this system really shine.
Provoking Thoughts 