Wii-mote to be karaoke Wii-mic...and Wii-<i>phone</i>?

What we heard: Besides filing trademarks with the US Patent Office, one of the ways game companies tip their hand about an upcoming title is by registering Web domain names. That's apparently what happened to Nintendo this week, when some eagle-eyed fan noticed the company had registered the domain "wiikaraoke.com."

Given Nintendo's efforts to target nongamers and its emphasis on party games, many took the URL as evidence of a karaoke title for the next-gen console. With any other platform, that would be the end of it. But since the Wii's controller--often called the "Wii-mote"--has a speaker in it, speculation rose that said speaker would also act as a microphone.

The microphone theory got a further boost courtesy of a post on Nintendo Revolution Analysis, the blog of a 26-year-old Mexican gamer who calls himself "Yanko." Using diagrams from the patent and for the Wii-mote, Yanko outlines how it could encode and transmit audio from an external analog source to the Wii console. By inference, that means the Wii-mote will be able to act as a microphone.

Besides karaoke games, the obvious application for a Wii-mote-mic would be voice commands a la Nintendogs or Odama. However, some sites have gone one step further. A string of reports tracing back to a MegaGames.com article speculates that with the Wii's built-in wireless Internet functionality, the Wii-mote could support voice-over IP. That would give it functionality like an Xbox Live headset and could allow it to be used like a phone. As Yanko notes, that would be a very big draw to nongamers indeed.

Bogus or not bogus?: The Wiikaraoke.com patent is real, and the patent analysis is convincing, so we'll go with not bogus on the Wii-mic. As for voice-over IP, given that the Nintendo DS already has it, you can bet the Wii will too.