Houston, Wii've got a problem?

[Pranjal]

 

Any piece of consumer electronics is bound to ship with a small number of units affected by hardware problems. From manufacturing defects to units manhandled during shipping, a small percentage of devices will exhibit some kind of abnormality. Still, with the recently introduced Nintendo Wii containing untested electronics in the form of the motion sensor, it is a useful task to see if early adopters are having any more problems than usual. The answer: not really.

 

The official Nintendo Wii forums have been host to a number of folks having various issues with their brand new console. One person had their Wiimotes go out of sync and resist repeated manual resyncing. Another had their Wii freeze up in standby mode.

 

Connecting the Wii to the Internet has proven problematic for some users. The console will display numeric error messages if it cannot connect to the Wii's network. Error 110213 is a typical message, which can sometimes be resolved by upgrading the firmware for certain brands of routers (such as Linksys) but in other situations indicates a hardware failure for which the unit must be replaced. There were also reports of DNS propagation issues with the newly-launched Wii store.

 

Others found that the console worked well until the first software update was installed from the Internet, after which the dreaded 110213 error made its appearance. However, the number of users affected by the update bug appears to be quite small.

 

Some gamers have reported that the Wiimote sensor is sensitive to light from the sun, as well as highly reflective surfaces between the player and the sensor bar. Changing the environment that the Wii is played in seems to fix these problems.

 

Minor but still irritating issues include some units being unable to recognize SD memory cards—as the Wii has no internal hard drive, it can use flash memory cards to extend its built-in storage. According to the manual, the Wii supports the SD format.

 

Nintendo has announced that they will replace damaged Wii consoles free of charge, so the only downside for afflicted gamers is having to wait for a replacement unit. After three days of the Wii being available, the hardware problems thread in the support forum had barely made it to the second page of posts (21 in total). While this is a completely unscientific measurement of how many people are having problems, the low number of posts does point to the problems being fairly rare. We'll keep an eye on future Wii issues, but for now, the problems don't seem widespread enough to discourage anyone from picking one up. Your biggest challenge will be Black Friday crowds and the general rush of the Christmas shopping season

 

 

Link: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061122-8277.html

[Jake]

Nintendo has announced that they will replace damaged Wii consoles free of charge

I think that's all people need to know if their Wii's are messing up.