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computerandvideogames Hundreds turn up for Oxford Street Wii launch event. We were on the scene. Here’s our full report. The Nintendo Wii officially arrived in the UK last night, at HMV in Oxford Street, London, where the official launch festivities took place and gamers turned up in the hundreds for a chance of getting their hands on the new Nintendo hardware.

According to a HMV spokesperson almost 500 fans turned up for the event, where by midnight the queue already stretched along Oxford Street and around the corner - leaving us to ponder if the people at the back had even a fighting chance of seeing the shop counters before breakfast.

The store reportedly received over 1200 Wii-related phone calls yesterday alone - three quarters of which were from people wondering if they could get their hands on a console without pre-ordering. Rolling up Oxford Street just before the main event at midnight, a white Wii bus unloaded a sprinkling of celebrities to show off their Wii Sports skills (or lack of) for the crowd, including virtual tennis hot-shots Ian Wright, Nell McAndrew, Ricky Hatton and Pat Cash.

First in the queue was 17 year-old Zelda fanatic Marwan Elgamal, who pitched up his tent at 5pm on Tuesday in order to guarantee a Wii in his house this weekend, which was finally handed over to him by Mr Wright at gone 12.

itwire The Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) has issued a draft standard, its first, on exposure to extremely low frequency (ELF) electromagnetic radiation throwing the spotlight back onto an area of concern that has, of late, been overshadowed by fears of possible cancer-inducing cellphone radiation. The standard covers the range of frequencies from zero to 3kHz. However the frequency most commonly encountered is the 50Hz (60Hz in the US and some other countries) used for mains power.

Dr Colin Roy of ARPANSA told iTWire that the levels of exposure likely to be encountered from mains devices in the home were well below those set out in the draft standard. However he said: “There is this underlying issue of an apparent link between ELF magnetic fields and childhood leukaemia. It has not been proven but this association is found at fields strengths very very much lower than the limits in the draft standard. So we try to bring in a precautionary approach and to give in the accompanying papers possible mitigation strategies if people are concerned.”

He added: “If we had really strong evidence of a link between ELF and childhood leukaemia the limits in the standard would have to reflect that and that would cause all sorts of problems for society.”

itwire Firefox 2 only launched six weeks ago, but there appear to be no plans for a Firefox 2.5 with the alpha, developer version of Firefox just made available on Friday. With the majority of web surfers still using a version of Internet Explorer, Microsoft had better be working quickly on IE8.
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Just as with Vista, it was a long time between drinks for users of Internet Explorer 6. Yes, Internet Explorer 7 is available, but plenty of users decided to defect over to Firefox, with smaller numbers using Maxthon, Opera and other browsers instead.

My personal preference is still Maxthon, now in a 2.0 beta release, with many of the goodies intact from the previous Maxthon 1.x versions, but it’s still a bit too buggy for my liking, so I’m using both IE7 and Firefox 2.0 on my Vista equipped computer.

While Firefox 3.0 alpha, codenamed ‘Gran Paradiso’, won’t be finished until at least a year, it’s already been worked on for over a year, according to Mozilla Vice President of Engineering, Mike Schroepfer.

It is only recommended for developers or testers, it’s an early milestone that shows the Firefoxers are serious about extending their market share even further. Once again, it’s important for existing Firefox 2.0 users not to upgrade – alpha releases are very early test versions.
New features are being added to modernize Firefox for the Web 2.0/Web 3.0 world, with developers hoping that support for the ‘Cairo graphics library’, with ‘Scalable Vector Graphics’ (SVG) and Canvas specifications are also set to be better supported, will ensure that web pages look identical no matter what device they’re viewed on, be it a PC running Windows 2000, XP, 2003 or Vista, Linux, Macs and small screen devices.

itwire The phenomenal early success the Nintendo Wii and its star attraction, the Wiimote, is beginning to cause the company some problems. First there was the issue of of Wiimotes flying out of users hands. Now a California-based company has filed a patent infringement suit against the Wiimote. However, the Wiimote appears safe from the claim. Camarillo-based Interlink electronics, a publicly traded company which manufactures mainly business related human interface products, has alleged that the Wiimote infringes a patent it has for a one handed wireless pointing device that is designed to be used as replacement for a computer mouse. In the patent, the device is described as a “trigger operated electronic device”.

An examination of both devices and their means of operation, however, indicates that the Wii would appear to be out of the firing line.

The patent drawings of the Interlink pointing device show some superficial similarities in both appearance and controls to the Wii, including the shape and trigger control. The purpose of the Interink device is obviously intended for a different application to Wii.

However, the key question of the lawsuit will be whether the technology used by Wii to achieve its wireless motion sensitivity is just another application of the patented motion sensitive technology developed by Interlink.

itwire Based on reports of what’s circulating through the blogosphere, video consumers are mighty dissatisfied with Blu-ray and gamers are unhappy that PS3 has upped the price of the console by including Blu-ray. Then of course, there’s all of those stories about how Sony couldn’t meet its production targets. In 2007, when PS3 stocks are plentiful, they’ll eat their words. The few hundred thousand of console units Sony has brought to market in the US and Japan so far have sold out within minutes. The Japanese games market leader believes it will starting biting huge chunks out of the new generation consoles market once it is able to get sufficient supplies into stores.

Meanwhile, an under reported fact is that the biggest selling console on the market last month was not the Wii, PS3 or Xbox 360 but the PS2.

According to research group Cymfony, consumers are turning away from Blu-ray, based on research of the sentiments of chatter in thousands of blogs. However, Sony appears unfazed by the Cymfony findings.

There is currently a huge campaign underway from HD DVD advocates to push the standard ahead of Blu-ray. One group, calling itself HD Now Online has created a website calling for petitions to pressure movie studios to get behind HD DVD and move away from Blu-ray.