Remember that post a couple of weeks back where we were told in no uncertain terms that leaving electronic devices on standby is BAD? After applying the 3.0 version of the Wii firmware on Wednesday, we tried to fire up the Wii’s Forecast Channel and News Channels with WiiConnect24 Standby disabled. Here’s the result:
That’s a bit poor. I get that you might require standby for the new feature that displays current weather and news in the Wii main menu, but that’s hardly an essential component. There’s no good reason to require standby Internet access for a weather or news channel that only displays on demand. I call it shoddy coding.
There were a whole load of other updates, including an unsubstatiated rumour that the fan will now turn on if WiiConnect24 is running. This would theoretically address the problem that we noticed last month where WiiConnect24 consoles were damaging themselves, assuming that the rampant speculation of overheating being the cause is true.
You can find a full list of the 3.0 firmware update changes over at Intendo.
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March 16th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
This is the one thing about the Wii that drives me nuts. Does anyone know of a program we can load on the Wii that will access the news and weather when they are selected and let you turn the Wii full off when not in use?
September 13th, 2008 at 8:13 am
My workaround is to leave WiiConnect24 Standby enabled, and whenever I shut down, hold the Wii’s power button until it shuts off completely (red light).
It’s an annoyance though… why do they require this? It actually seems like the weather is displayed in the menu anyway, and disabling WiiConnect24 Standby only prevents you from getting it on-demand. I agree with your “shoddy coding” hypothesis.