512 MB is amazingly small for anything other than cartridge based videogames, but I also don't think Nintendo should move towards a hard-drive. Ultimately, 8GB of flash memory is really not that expensive anymore and by this time next year Nintendo should be able to sell a Wii with 16GB of flash.

Personally, I think a hard-drive is a bad choice for something that wants to be an inexpensive gaming system because hard-drives are expensive and don't see much in the way of price reductions, tend to be slow and have a high failure rate (compared to memory). For Sony/Microsoft it makes sense because of the non-gaming fuctions but will eventually limit how inexpensive these systems can become.

 dude you dreaming, you'll get 2GB if your lucky otherwise I get the feeling that Nintendo will probably go for the 1GB, you know why cuz Nintendo doesn't want to go the high tech road and the wii is a clear example of that, but hey it's Worked for Nintendo so Kudos to them.

Yeah, they aren't going to make a hard drive for above reasons, they will definately go the SD route which is perfectly fine with me because I don't want to be stuck with a wii that doesn't have a hard drive when all the newer models do have one.

512 isn't terrible right now (unless you really really love your virtual console), but as soon as wiiware becomes available it's going to be tiny. I mean, just looking at Final Fantasy CC for wii you can tell that's not some 32 MB game, it's going to need a substantial amount of your 512MB. And with everybody else making cheap indie games for it, you'll go through 512 in no time. They desperately need to make a firmware update for SD support.

And I think they will, conveniently timed around when Wii ware launches, possibly with there own 1st part 8 gig SD cards.

 for Nintendo, yeah, very high tech, for everyone else no.

High capacity isn't high tech, sorry. They can release a 16GB flash upgrade that plugs into the USB in the back, or even into the SD slot, update the Wii to support the memory and since it's their brand memory, likely encrypted to a Wii, you could download stuff to it and launch channels from it. Very possible all told. Heck they could even get something plugged into a GC memory slot with high density flash memory packed in.

 it is expensive stuff, and I don't think Nintendo will want to comprimise their profit per console sold

Nintendo spent two generations with technology which was far more advanced than the market leader and ended up having a shrinking marketshare to show for it ... "High Tech" isn't an unfamiliar concept to Nintendo, they are just the only console company that has realized that "High Tech" for the sake of being "High Tech" is a bad strategy.

Maybe they're wrong, but seeing how the XBox 360, PS3 and PSP are selling compared to the Wii and DS makes me think they're really onto something. I suspect that if Nintendo saw value in puting 8/16/32/64 GB of flash memory into the Wii they would do it without question; in contrast Microsoft and Sony would have put 64 GB of flash memory into their system and then tried to figure out how to use it.

The day the Wii gets 60 GB is the day that the Xbox 360 gets 500 GB, and the Playstation 3 gets 800 GB.

If only I could delete this double post...

I haven't had any problems with space yet. And besides, you can get a SD card fairly cheaply now anyway. If they do add a HD for the Wii, I hope it's external, rather than turning the Wii into SKU soup like the XBox360 and PS3.