Tag Archive for 'wii'

Nokia seek inspiration from the Wii

Published by Stuart Houghton on April 29, 2008 in Biz & Tech. 0 Comments

nintendo_wii_1.jpgNokia’ chief designer has dropped some hints about the kind of user interfaces the company are investigating.

You might assume that Alastair Curtis would be gleaning ideas from iPhone, Android, the OLPC wiior any number of communications or computing devices but no, he was spending a lot of his time playing with his Nintendo Wii and checking out the emotional feedback from his nunchucks.

“I bought the Wii almost the day it came out. The emotional feedback is three or four times more emotionally engaging than PS3 or Xbox 360,” says Curtis, “We’re starting to do that in the 6600 Fold. We have to do that more and more.”

Curtis uses the example of turning a phone upside down to put it into silent mode as an example of ‘meaningful insight’ into the kind of emotional feedback people can get from their handsets.

Interestingly, much of what he is talking about is already being implemented by the homebrew programming community.  FlipSilent does exactly what he describes and there is even a project out there that lets your control your N95 using an actual Wii remote.



Use a Wii controller with S60 and UIQ phones with MobiPad

Published by Stuart Houghton on April 1, 2008 in Games and Other stuff. 0 Comments

mobipad.jpgPlaying games on a mobile can be a frustrating experience - N-Gages aside, few phones are built for the the precise controls that any decent action game requires and fat-fingered players won’t know whether they are running or jumping.

Sure, there are specialist game pad add-ons available, but these are not cheap and few but the most dedicated mobile gamers would actually pay for one.

MobiPad lets Wii owners use their magic wands with their UIQ or S60 mobiles.

The app pairs your phone and a Wii controller via Bluetooth and runs on all Symbian OS S60 3rd edition and UIQ3 devices.

In practice, the Wii controller works like as standard ‘Gameboy style’ D-Pad and button combo. The Wii controller’s motion-sensors are supported by MobiPad’s code but the developers are still figuring out what to map it’s controls to on the phone. Perhaps as we see more accelerometer based games appearing this feature might come into its own.

MobiPad is a free download, available here.