Specs of Nintendo Wii U leaked

While Nintendo’s Wii U has been the only next generation console announced so far, there is frighteningly little information about it. The most we know is that the controller will sport a tablet-esque touchscreen and that the game is getting what looks to be one of the last remaining hopes of the survival horror genre in mainstream gaming as a launch title. Now, according to Pocket Lint, the specs of Nintendo’s next-gen console have been leaked.

The specs were sent to VGleaks by an anonymous source that claims to have access to the Nintendo developer-only resource, Wario World. The main shocker from the leaked specs is that the console will only have 8GB of internal space. Nintendo seems to be relying on SD Cards for more memory. The Wii U will be compatible with SD cards of up to 2GB and SDHC cards of up to 32GB, which is still quite low, compared to the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3.

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Specs of the Wii U have been leaked

The system will also be packing an “Espresso” CPU with three enhanced Broadway cores, and the graphics will be handled by a high-definition GPU based on “GPU7” from AMD Radeon. Along with this, the Wii U will have 1GB of RAM. The next-gen console will be able to connect to external hard drives through one of four USB 2.0 ports.

Back in July, there were speculations about the price for the Nintendo Wii U. Earlier, Amazon had reported that the Wii U would cost £199 (around Rs 17,000), but they had to remove the listing and the pre-orders because that was not what the price was supposed to be. Amazon’s mistake came at the expense of the consumers who pre-ordered Nintendo’s next generation console. Various sources are now reporting that the Wii U will cost around £50 more than the price that Amazon had listed.

A Japanese business newspaper had claimed that the Wii U will release for about ¥30,000, which is roughly £250. For the sake of comparison, the PlayStation 3, 160GB model has an MSRP of ¥24,980, and the Wii’s MSRP is ¥20,000 in Japan. The newspaper also reports that the Wii U will support non-game content, including a car navigator, books, and a karaoke service with around 10,000 songs. An unnamed senior publisher had talked to MCV UK, stating that the Wii U “will definitely be less than £249.”

With the Wii U, Nintendo promises that it won’t miss out on multiplatform games, because the hardware will be much closer to what Sony and Microsoft will have to offer.

“We have not successfully kept the momentum of the Wii for about the last two years because third-party publishers have released a smaller number of game titles and Nintendo has also decreased new games for the platform in preparation for the launch of the Nintendo 3DS and the Wii U,” said Satoru Iwata, the president of Nintendo, at an annual meeting with shareholders.

Nintendo also seems to be really focusing on the touchscreen on their controller for the console. Iwata hopes that the Wii U’s innovative GamePad controller with the screen will help the console to be different from what Microsoft or Sony would be doing, and hopes to change the way people think about a gaming console.

The Nintendo Wii U is set for a winter release in 2012.