Wednesday, August 3, 2011

A Gaming Revolution

Wii is a video gaming console released by Nintendo Corporation Limited on November 19, 2006 in North America. In Japan, it was released on December 2, 2006, where as in Australia it was released on December 7, 2006. Nintendo Corporation Limited is a multinational corporation located in Kyoto, Japan and founded on September 23, 1889. The company deals in several niche businesses and is listed as Japan’s third most valuable company with a market value of over USD $85 billion. Nintendo Wii primarily competes with Xbox 360 of Microsoft and PlayStation 3 of Sony. Nintendo wii games broke the record for best selling console in a single month in the United States in the year 2009 and lead the worldwide sales over PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in August, 2011. One of the most distinguishing features of the Nintendo gaming console is its wireless Wii Remote controller which can be used as a handheld device and detects the movement in all 3-dimensions. Another interesting feature of the Wii console is WiiConnect 24 which allows receiving of messages and updating over the internet in standby mode.

Every Nintendo Wii gaming console comes with Mario Kart Wii game in which the user can create his or her Mii characters and enjoy other range of fun built-in content. Since all the Wii gaming console systems can be connected to the internet, it provides access to Netflix where the user can download other games. The Wi-Fi enabled console can also be connected through Bluetooth and through LAN adapter via USB port. The storage capacity of 512 MB internal flash memory comes with SD card, SDHC card and Nintendo GameCube Memory card. It operates with IBM Power PC-based “Broadway” system and ATI “Hollywood” is the graphics processing unit used in this console. Since this graphics processing unit was designed by AMD’s graphics product division, it is manufactured using 90 nm CMOS process as the “Broadway” processor. Its another online feature of Wii Shop Channel allows the user to do online shopping for Wii video games and download Virtual Console and Wii Ware games and new channels. Wii Shop Channel can be organized into three sections of Virtual Console, WiiWare and Wii Channels.

The best selling games of Wii console are Wii Sports and Wii Play. Wii Sports was developed as the launch title for the Wii video game console and was included as pack-in game with the console system. Wii Sports is a collection of 5 sports simulations that include tennis, golf, baseball, bowling and boxing. The sports simulations are designed to demonstrate the motion sensing capabilities of Wii remote control and the players can use the remote control system to mimic actions to be performed in real sports. Wii Play is a party video game that features characters from the Mii Channel. Several mini games like Duck Hunt shooting game and table tennis have been featured along with other types of mini games. Wii Play is the third best selling game on the Wii and can be purchased as a stand alone game or can be bonded with a Wii Remote.

A Sensational Smart Phone

Since the global demand for smart phones is growing at a faster rate, many big companies like Nokia, Samsung Electronics, Sony Ericsson and Taiwan based HTC have started in house production of these advanced smart phones, while companies like Apple and RIM outsource the production. All these companies are competing for a very big consumer market for smart phone systems world over. A smart phone is a hi-end phone that offers a combination of personal digital assistant and a mobile phone and serves more advanced computing ability and connectivity than a contemporary phone. More advanced models of smart phones also have camera features with high resolution touch screen, GPS navigation, portable media player, Wi-Fi and broadband access. Since these advanced phones run with mobile operating system, many companies like Apple use iOS system, Google smart phones have android based operating system, Microsoft uses Windows Phone 7 and Nokia works on Symbian operating system. The HTC Desire is a smart phone developed by one of the leading mobile phone company named HTC Corporation. This smart phone is also code named as Bravo and was announced on 16th of February, 2010. In Europe and Australia, this smart phone was released in the second quarter of the year 2010.

HTC’s Desire runs on Android operating system which has been upgraded from version 2.1 to version 2.2 at present. The sensational phone includes an immersive HTC Sense experience which makes this phone easy-to-use with best entertaining features. The dimensions of the premium phone at 119 x 60 x 11.9 mm offers a unique contoured design with a secure grip and stunning good looks. With a very light weight of 135 grams only, this phone has excellent multimedia features. The display size of desire at 480 × 800 pixels or 3.7 inches has AMOLED or SLCD capacitive touch screen that offers 16 million colors. The touch screen features include multi-touch input method, optical track pad, gorilla glass display, proximity sensor for auto turn-off and accelerometer sensor for UI auto-rotate. HTC Disire comes with an internal memory of 576 MB RAM and 512 MB ROM and card slot memory can be extended by up to microSD 32 GB and more. The web browsing features are powered by the super fast 1 Ghz scorpion processor based on Adreno 200 GPU and Qualcomm QSD8250 Snapdragon chipset. The 5 mega pixel camera with 2592 × 1944 pixel image resolution quality has auto focus, LED flash and geo-tagging features.

The built-in high definition camcorder with WVGA 800 × 480 pixels video resolution quality offers to record movies at 15 frames per second. The advanced version of Android 2.2 offers video recording of 720 pixel resolution at 30 frames per second. The Wi-Fi enabled phone also has seven customizable panels which allow tailoring of phone as per the need of the user. The phone also features GPRS, 3G and Bluetooth technology which offers internet access at any place and at any time. The stand-by battery time for up to 340 hours for 2G and up to 360 hours for 3G is supported by standard Li-Ion battery.