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Nintendo Wii's Opera BETA and Weather Channel
Nick - writer - posted on Tuesday, 01/02/07 0:52:24 EST
Hey folks, Nick here once again with a new opinion post all about the two new things just added to the Nintendo Wii, the Weather Channel and the new Opera Internet BETA.
First, the Weather Channel.
This was one of the two things on the Wii Menu that we had to wait for now the Weather Channel is here. I had gotten up around 5:30 in the morning to use the restroom and I had come back into my room and my Wii’s blue light was on. “Who the hell was sending me email at this hour?” I thought. It turned out to be the Nintendo Email letting me know the Channel was finally ready.
It’s really simple to use the Weather Channel, just tell the Wii were your from and it will give you the weather near you. It’s all good and all but the stuff you get is WAY off. I had come home from work and I looked at the channel and it said “Islip NY, Rain last updated 4:10 PM”. And guess what? It didn’t rain all day! Were the hell are they getting the weather from? I also had it say that the weather was 71 but in the City it was 56.
Even though the weather is really off the cool feature of the Weather Channel is the World Map feature. When you click on it you get the whole globe and using the Wiimote you can check on weather throughout the world. Wondering what’s the weather like on Easter Island? Now you can find out! It’s pretty cool spinning the globe around and seeing what it’s like in other places.
So while this doesn’t really add anything new or special to the Wii, it’s free and worth checking out. I just wish the forecasts would be better then what they have now.
Now for the Opera BETA
One of the huge things when they announced the Wii was that it would be partnered with Opera and you could go on the internet with it. They finally put the BETA test up and it’s free to download from the Nintendo Store via the Wii Menu.
It’s very simple to use, you can save favorite places, browsing is pretty easy to do with the Wiimote and they have a quick text feature when you go to type.
One of the best things is that Flash works with the browser. So you can watch Youtube videos and even Homestar Runner cartoons as well. One problem is that the cache fills up fast and you need to reset the program to load up more stuff. But it’s cool being able to watch stuff from Youtube right from my room.
The cool thing with this is now you can check sites like GameFAQs right from your chair. So if you get stuck in Zelda, just go type it in, find out what you’re looking for and you can get back into your game lickidy split.
Since this is a BETA not everything is in place. I’m wondering what there going to add. Personally I’d like to be able to save pictures and MP3’s right to the SD card. It’d be cool if you could save a picture and go right to Photo Channel so you can send it to people and use the other options with the channel.
So if you got some time to kill, check out both of the new Wii Channels. The Weather Channel is free and the Opera will be a one time download for five bucks which isn’t too bad considering you can play Flash games that are sometimes better then a Virtual Console game costing around the same price.