Wii enhancements: Wee!

There’s good news for gamers, yet again. The Nintendo Wii is possibly the greatest gaming system ever in life (warning: the preceding was a completely biased opinion and no, the author does not care), and Nintendo has plans to make it even better. Hot on the heels of the wildly popular Wii-Fit, which is has revolutionized the lives of fat-bottomed (warning: the preceding was a Queen reference, who caught that?) gamers everywhere, Nintendo intends to enhance the standard Wii-mote with a wee, teeny box called the Wii MotionPlus. It’s supposed to enhance the Wii-mote’s response and precision, and to make playing games on the Wii an overall more intense experience – namely because it is much more motion sensitive. Nintendo’s also introducing Wii Music, which lets gamers play fifty different instruments, just the way they are really played. The balance board is going to double as part of a drum kit – it will be the bass drum. Ba-dum ching, baby.

Go iGoogle yourself.

Google’s upping the ante and it looks like they’re seriously attempting to compete with social networking sites like MySpace and FaceBook. They’re all about supporting OpenSocial now and they are finally – finally – reworking that bland homepage. I guess they’ve finally started listening to people’s complaints about it. These new improvements to iGoogle are an answer to public opinion as well. They plan to incorporate some of the elements and features already implemented in Gmail to spice things up a bit. iGoogle will have chat functions similar to Gmail and there will actually be real gadgets. The tabs are going to run up and down on the left side rather than on the top and you’ll soon be able to see what your friends are doing, via news feeds similar to what you can find on MySpace. Another social networking site ... I don’t know though. Google might be asking for trouble, throwing themselves into the ring with MySpace.

Tales from an iPhone Convert

I have seen the face of the Second Coming, and it is the iPhone 3G. All right, that’s a little hyperbolic, but considering the fact that I have long been anti-Apple and anti-iPhone (this is mostly because until, oh, now, most cell phone service – including AT&T wireless – in my area has been non-existent; plus I cannot use a Mac to save my life. No matter!), it’s still a big deal. This phone is beautiful. The other day I was doing something that required me to read a TIME article on Steve Jobs’ new baby, and before I was halfway finished, I became a complete convert. If Apple or AT&T would take an IOU for the promise of my first-born child, I’d be right there in the thick of the frenzy that’s sure to take place nationwide on July 11, when the 3G’s set to go on sale.

Apparently, this thing can load up graphic-heavy web sites in 29 seconds (whereas the original iPhone takes nearly a minute). That’s all thanks to the 3G network. It’s got honest-to-goodness GPS tracking and navigation (and the demonstration, Jobs showed the audience real-time footage of a 3G user going down San Francisco’s famously twisting Lombard Street – and evidently they actually cheered for it) and there are going to be tons of applications for it. Among them are games so awesome that they rival the graphics on the PSP.

What’s seriously awesome, though, is the price. According to TIME, the 8GB iPhone 3G is supposed to start out at $199, and at $299, the 16GB 3G is still one hundred dollars less than the price of the original iPhone’s 8GB model.

So I’m not saying that I’m going to rush right out and buy one in July – but I am thinking about it, and I will covet anyone who has one. I will covet them sharply, with brand new #2 pencils.