Early this morning, Nintendo updated North American Wii systems with the Wii News Channel. The News Channel, as previously announced, features content from the Associated Press and will download news while the Wii is in standby, or the user is browsing the News Channel. Users can get the News Channel through a System Update. The update also adds the News Channel to the Parental Controls of the system. The update was fairly quick, but the initial loading of articles was somewhat slow. Future updates were speedier, though.

Users can browse the News Channel by category. Current categories include National, International, Business, Sports, Technology, Arts/Entertainment, and Science/Health. The News Channel offers a standard column format of articles to browse, as well as a slide show that moves users across a virtual globe as news in varying regions is displayed. Users can also use globe navigation to browse news by region, similarly to the Weather Channel.

The UI for the channel is mostly well done. All of the articles can be set at varying levels of zoom for enhanced readability, including the article listings, the actual news articles, and the slideshow and globe views. However, it still feels like there is room for improvement. It would be nice to be able to subscribe to specific keywords to get those news articles downloaded for browsing. It would also be nice if the region settings carried over from the Weather Channel to offer a customized regional news channel, and the globe UI isn’t as easy to access as it should be. Overall, though, this seems like a good start, and seems much more informative than the counterpart weather channel.