Wii outsold rival PlayStation 3 by more than double in the US last month as the freshly launched videogame consoles vied with Xbox 360 for devotees, figures released on Friday showed.
Nintendo sold 476,140 of its Wii consoles in the US last month while Sony managed to sell 196,580 of its new PlayStations, the industry tracking group NPD said.
During the month, Microsoft sold 511,300 of its Xbox 360 consoles, which it brought to market a year ago. Wii and PlayStation 3 were released for sale in the US in the middle of last month.
PHOTO: AFP
Manufacturing problems curtailed the number of PlayStation 3 systems available for the US and Japan launches and prompted Sony to postpone the consoles' Europe debut next year.
Wii consoles were snatched-up quickly after their debut in Europe on Friday as the innovative system featuring motion-responsive controllers gained status as the must-have video game.
But some fans of Wii are having trouble holding onto the videogame console's wireless controller, which can be swung as a bat or racquet in sports games.
The controller's wrist strap tends to snap during vigorous play, according to postings on Web sites including Somethingawful.com. One user said the screen to his 60-inch TV set was cracked when the controller flew from a friend's hand as the strap broke during play. Photos that accompanied the posting showed the broken TV and severed wrist strap.
Nintendo is looking into a remedy for the problem, president Satoru Iwata said during a Tokyo news conference on Friday, the New York Times Web site reported.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts