With the recent influx of Wii related rumors flying around the Internet its hard to trust many of them. But when a source turns out to be IGN, one feels inclined to listen. In their article they have stated several new pieces of information regarding the nature of Nintendo's innovative controller.

The key points in the article unveil:

  • The Wii-Mote runs off AA Alkaline Batteries with approximately 30 to 60 hours of life, this is dependent on how many features of the controller are used. There is always the chance that Nintendo are developing a rechargeable battery pack option, but still a stated average of 40 hours life is pretty impressive.

  • The four LED's on the Wii-mote indicate which controller the player is holding. But they also light up when the console is powered on to indicate how much battery life remains, the more LED's, the more power remaining. 4 indicate 75-100% life, 3 being 50-75%, 2 then is 25-50% and 1 shows 0-25% of the power is remaining.

  • The memory capacity inside the controller is apparently going to be 6KB of non-volatile (doesn't go when powers off) memory. This should be enough to suffice for the personalized controller idea, but features using the memory have yet to be announced.

  • The rumble feature inside the Wii-mote does not give force feedback, it will either rumble or not. Apparently some sensitivity can still be obtained by allowing for short burst of rumble in the pad.

  • The controller is now confirmed to work on a 2.4GHZ Bluetooth band

  • The synchronize button on the Wii, located under the flap, is used to assign the controllers to the machine. This will be in a similar process to the Xbox 360.

  • The sensor bar can be placed above and below the TV and the actual sensors are contained at both ends of the bar. It's quite small at 20cm and doesn't look an eyesore

  • There are issues with certain lighting and mirrors effecting the sensors. The degree of which is not apparent but fluorescent and halogen light sources seem to be the main issue

As if this wasn't enough IGN went on to do some more speculation about the possibility of the controller being able to act as a camera, maybe. This is best heard from the horses mouth:

Interestingly, according to documentation the Wii-mote is able to act as something of an eye, measuring coordinates between 0-1023 on the X axis and 0-767 on the Y axis, which means that it is more or less seeing a megapixel image. Whether or not this data can be interrupted into visual information remains unknown, but we're not ruling out the possibility that the pointer could sub as a camera. This is, of course, purely speculative on our part

Well thanks goes to IGN on that one, some more information can be found in their full article

[source wii.ign.com]