Posts Tagged: ‘Nintendo’
Lots of stuff going on today, so here are some highlights:
Nintendo dropped the price of the Wii to $199 in the United States. John P. Falcone wrote in CNET’s Crave blog about the change, which comes hot on the heels of Sony’s cut in the Playstation 3′s price to $299, and a little farther back, Microsoft’s cut in the 120GB hard drive version of the Xbox 360. I’m guessing that will help push the three consoles through the holiday season, but I’m also thinking sales will remain slow, based on what I’ve heard.
Andrew Nusca wrote at ZDNet that Microsoft‘s acquisition of Danger has yielded two Sharp-manufactured phones, the Turtle and the Pure. These are part of the so-called Pink Project. The pictures look a little like Danger’s Sidekick devices. A few days ago, Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet said Pink Project phones will use a version of Windows Mobile 7 and will be able to use the Zune music store.
So here I am in Los Angeles, waking up at the crack of dawn (which feels like sleeping in — I’m still on Atlanta time) and hitting the Nintendo press conference. Nintendo unveiled several products during the presentation. While many were on our radar already, there were still a few surprises.
Ben Kutchera has a review of the new Nintendo DSi over at Ars Technica. I’ve been putting off reading about the new portable console because I’d heard that the new machine would have a couple little cameras in it. I wondered, as I’m sure many others have, “how does adding cameras make the DSi all that new?”
Sony’s Playstation 3 is the only one of the major gaming consoles to have sold fewer machines than it did last year, according to Andrea James of seattlepi.com.
Nintendo’s Wii is running off with the prize, at the moment, though Microsoft’s Xbox 360 sold more in February 2009 than it did in the same month for 2008. And 2008 was a leap year, too. James quoted data from industry analysts the NPD Group, explaining that the Wii sold 753,000 machines in February this year, the Xbox 360 sold 391,000 and the PS3 276,000. The Wii sold 74 percent more machines, to the Xbox’s 53 percent. PS3 sales dropped 2 percent, but were up from January 2009′s numbers.
Also, games are on fire. More than 20 million games were sold last month in the United States — and that’s up 14 percent from the year before. Pretty amazing in an economic recession, isn’t it?
Get a console-by-console update on the developments of the 2008 E3 exposition in this HowStuffWorks podcast, including news on improved online features and expanded memory. Check out our HowStuffWorks article “How Video Game Systems Work” to learn more.
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