Nintendo said Wednesday that its Wi-Fi Connection service--which allows Nintendo DS users to play wirelessly against each other--has surpassed 5 million users.
All told, the video game giant said, users have initiated more than 200 million sessions, playing games like Animal Crossing: Wild World, Mario Kart DS, Metroid Prime Hunters and others wirelessly.
Sony Corp. says it will introduce its first HD Radio products in July, joining the growing group of companies seeking to make the next-generation digital radio technology a standard feature in audio products over the next several years.
HD Radio is new form of digital radio broadcasting that allows radio stations to deliver extra music content on up to four side channels that piggyback on the frequency it already uses. So far, more than 1,200 radio stations nationwide have adopted the technology, according to the HD Digital Radio Alliance, a group of broadcasters promoting the new format.
A listener, however, needs a special radio receiver to hear HD Radio signals, which also boasts improved sound quality. About 50 models are available already, often sold as part of a car stereo or home audio component, according to the alliance.
"Digital terrestrial radio is the last frontier in audio," said Andrew Sivori, a senior product marketing manager at Sony's personal audio division. "And it's coming to price points that are becoming more reasonable for consumers."
Sony's first HD Radio products will be the XDR-S3HD, a $200 tabletop AM/FM/HD radio, and the XT-100HD, a $100 tuner module for vehicles that will work with most Sony car stereo units.
The HD Radio alliance projects that more than 1.5 million HD Radio devices will be sold in 2007, as prices have dropped significantly from the time the first products debuted more than two years ago at about $800.
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If this doesn’t tell the Sony executives that they better get a killer app game out for its PlayStation 3 sooner rather than later, we don’t know what will. Over at the North Carolina State University an associate professor of computer science went out and bought eight PS3 units and then clustered them together to combine their processing power. Apparently the demos for “Resistance: Fall of Man” wasn’t enough to impress Dr. Frank Mueller about the PS3’s gaming ability, but he can get a decent level of supercomputing processing power out of the 64 logical processors that are banked together. Mueller admits that his Sony supercomputer solution is constrained by the 256 megs of RAM and networking hiccups, but for $5,000 the Cell chip architecture gives high enough performance for a relatively cheap cost. And, Mueller says, if he had 10,000 PS3s networked together he could create the world’s fastest computer. “Of course, here at NC State we will use it for educational purposes and for research,” said Professor Mueller, dispelling any hopes we had of a 8-player “Armored Core 4” deathmatch on campus. We would like to see what Professor Mueller would create with a Nintendo Wii or Microsoft Xbox 360 but then again the software for those consoles may distract him from his academic work.
