The Wii is a home video gaming console created and marketed by the influential video game company, Nintendo. Its primary market rivals are Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation, and Wii is presently ahead of them in terms of sales. Wii was first conceptualized by Nintendo in 2001, and was officially released in 2005 at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3).

The key difference between Wii and its competitors is the Wii Remote, which is a wireless controller. It can be used as a handheld pointing device and motion detector in three dimensions. Users, with the help of the Wii Remote, can engage and control objects on the screen. The Wii Remote enables this sort of enhanced interaction with the recognition of gestures and pointing. This sort of gesture and pointing recognition is accomplished with the use of accelerometer and optical sensor technology. One more unique feature is the WiiConnect24. It permits the Wii console to receive messages and critical updated through the internet.

What is Wii?

Hardware specifications

The Wii is the smallest home video game console made by Nintendo. It measures vertically 1.73 inches in width, 6.18 inches in height and 8.48 inches in depth. It is 2.7 pounds in weight, making the lightest home game console in production today. At the front, it has an optical drive that reads 12 cm Wii Optical Discs and Nintendo GameCube Game Discs. At first, the Wii was available only in the color white. It is now available in black, silver, lime green, and red.

The Wii is powered by the PowerPc based Broadway processor and also available with it is the ATI Hollywood GPU. It has 512 MB built-in flash memory and its storage can be expanded externally up to 32 GB via SD and SDHC card memory. It can support up to four Wii Remote controllers and has four Nintendo GameCube controller ports. It also has two USB 2.0 ports.

Console Features

The Wii menu interface is patterned on the television channel structure. Multiple channels are displayed as a grid and can be navigated through with the help of the Wii Remote. The six key channels available with the Wii console are:

  • Disc Channel
  • Photo Channel
  • Forecast Channel
  • Wii Shop Channel
  • News Channel
  • Mii Channel

Other channels can be downloaded from the Wii Shop Channel.

The Wii console is backward compatible with all Nintendo GameCube software, and also with its memory card and controllers. It also supports wireless connectivity with the Nintendo DS, a handheld gaming console. The Wii can connect to the Internet with the help of its built-in 802.11b/g Wi-Fi or with a USB to Ethernet adaptor.

Another important feature present with the Wii is parental controls. It prevents young children from playing games that would be inappropriate for their age group. The parental control feature in Wii reads the content rating from the game data and checks with the Wii’s set age limit. If the rating is superior to the system’s age limit, it will not load the game without a correct password.