Todays & Tomorrows Technology

We’re hearing that Nintendo’s Wii MotionPlus accessory is beginning to ship from Amazon, with preorder customers receiving emails telling them their Wiimote add-on is on its way. The MotionPlus dongle, which clips onto the base of the Wii’s controller, went up for preorder back at the start of May, priced at $19.99; it brings with it greater motion recognition accuracy.

That extra accuracy will mean that upcoming titles supporting the MotionPlus will be far better at tracking gamer movement. At launch, said-titles will include Virtua Tennis 2009, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10, Grand Slam Tennis and Wii Sports Resort. All are sold separately, though Nintendo will be offering a bundle of Sports Resort and the MotionPlus for $50.

However, the hackers who have already found the Wiimote to be a useful motion-controller for their own projects will also likely find some use from the MotionPlus. Long-time SlashGear tipster Robert Oschler points us to the WiiLi modding community, who are looking to develop a low-cost telemetry suit (where you move, and the robot moves with you; as opposed to in the video below, where movements are triggered by gesture recognition). Currently telemetry suits are expensive and specialist; the MotionPlus could be the first step in turning that around.

Palm’s “webOS Reset Doctor”, the tool intended to be used to reflash broken or bricked Palm Pre handsets, has leaked, and with it the full webOS ROM. Intended only for internal use, the ROM has already been cracked over in the PreCentral forums, and it’s throwing up not only some interesting tidbits about Palm’s intentions for the Pre but about the rumored Eos second device said to be launching later this year.

Mention has been found in the code of both “castle”, assumed to be the Pre’s internal codename, and “pixie”, which has previously been tipped as the codename for the Eos. Palm have never hidden the fact that the Pre is to be the first device of many to use webOS, but the presence of “pixie” in this first-gen code does seem to suggest that the handset is set to arrive sooner rather than later.

Elsewhere in the ROM, icons for MSN and AOL have been unearthed, together with a Java Virtual Machine. There are also plenty of comments left by webOS’ developers, including the somewhat worrying “# what the hell does this do?”

It was arguably the unofficial developer community that accelerated the original iPhone to success: while Apple were attempting to corral programmers into creating simple webapps, those with access to the hacked (aka jailbroken) core of the iPhone could use the same functionality that Apple’s own apps did. Might this be the turning point for the Pre, too?

Apple’s new 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pro notebooks were a surprise for their WWDC 2009 keynote, not least because most people were only expecting the iPhone 3G S. Still, we won’t turn our noses up at new unibody machines with boosted specifications, and so when Apple invited us to check out their new MacBook Pros we gladly accepted. Check out our hands-on first impressions after the cut.


You could say that the two new MacBook Pro machines are more of the same. They each keep the unibody casings of their predecessors, making them thin and light, but they now use non-user-serviceable batteries as in the MacBook Air and the 17-inch MacBook Pro. Apple say this allows them to squeeze high-capacity Li-Poly cells in there, boosting runtime to up to 7hrs; we won’t know whether that pans out until we’ve spent more time with our review units.