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.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
The US on Friday penalized two Chinese firms that acquired US chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際), including them among 32 entities that were added to the US Department of Commerce’s restricted trade list, a US government posting showed. Twenty-three of the 32 are in China. GMC Semiconductor Technology (Wuxi) Co (吉姆西半導體科技) and Jicun Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co (吉存半導體科技) were placed on the list, formally known as the Entity List, for acquiring equipment for SMIC Northern Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Beijing) Corp (中芯北方積體電路) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Beijing) Corp (中芯北京), the US Federal Register posting said. The
RSS