The Pipeline: Pundits go Wii

Welcome back to The Pipeline, a weekly feature where we dig through the mainstream media and see what the pundits, prognosticators and and pencil pushers have been discussing over the past week.



This week, the media was all over Nintendo's announcement that the gaming console formerly codenamed Revolution would henceforth be known as Wii. And, not surprisingly, most of the mainstream journos covering the story concurred with our assessment that the name somehow isn't going to wiin Niintendo any kudos. "Is Nintendo being desperately silly to attract attention, or is it just desperately short of clue?" asked the Guardian, while the Financial Times headlined its article "Wii aren't too sure about this." However, Nintendo did have at least one defender, Michael Pachter of Wedbush Morgan Securities, who pointed out that "N-Gage and Gizmondo are cool names" that didn't help those products win many fans. "Consumers relate to the coolness of the product, not the name." Wii'll see, Michael, Wii'll see.

Of course, the Wii announcement wasn't the only story in the news this week, and the mainstream press managed to crank out a few other interesting nuggets. USA Today took a look at the Pioneer Inno, and declared it "a winner," while The New York Times looked at the growing number of home docking systems for cellphones. Meanwhile, Forbes looked at another way to use cellphones at home, checking out the market for UMA-enabled handsets. Our favorite media hit this week, though, came from the Washington Post, which took an in-depth look at the DDR-as-exercise phenom, with the paper's reporter declaring, "Hello, my name is Caroline, and I'm addicted to 'Dance Dance Revolution.'" Hey, at least she's not addicted to the Wii.

http://www.engadget.com/2006/04/30/t...undits-go-wii/