Yes ladies and gentlemen the Wii finally gets another firmware update today, bringing the system up to 3.0U. The primary accomplishments of this update? A fairly major overhaul to the Wii Shop Channel and a clock on the main screen. Hey it’s not exactly loading games off an SD card, but we’ll take what we can get. For anyone curious about the Wii’s new abilities, we’ve got the full list of known changes after the jump.

(Thanks to NeoGAF poster EphemeralDream)

Here’s the list of changes as compiled by EphemeralDream and the fine folks at NeoGAF:

Channels:
-Digital Clock added to the Wii Menu right under the channel bar
-Forecast Channel now displays the current condition (cloudy, raining, etc.) directly in the Wii Menu in the Forecast Channel box
-News Channel can now show 2 scrolling headlines at a time in the Wii Menu, 3 when you click on the button (supposedly this requires occasional downloading of the headlines to keep the ticker updated)
-Message Board now has the “Today’s Accomplishments” message as a white message which allows it to stand out from other messages
-Address Book entries can now be shifted around using A+B (supposed to be a launch feature) but only to empty spaces. Not too convenient.
-Calendar in Message Board no longer shows “Today’s Accomplishment” only days as having messages
-Scrolling messages in the Message Board now uses a different sound

Wii Shop Channel Overhauled (Visual aesthetic is the same, changes made to organization and browsing methods mostly)
-New Welcome screen detailing 4 Recommended Titles and the points they cost (gone is the title screen bar that had linkable games). The title bar can be clicked on to bring up a list of 20 recommended games.
-Titles You’ve Downloaded was moved to the main shop menu
-New ways to browse
-Popular Titles (2 pages of 10 and includes launch games so not only based on recent info)
-Newest Additions remains the same
-Search for a title which can use partial names
-Search by Category
-System shows the different systems and how many titles have been released under each
-Publisher showing different publishers and amount of titles released (Nice logos!)
-Genre (different genres listed and amount of titles under each)

Settings
-Warning added pre-system update detailing that technically modified consoles may cease to function upon being updated. Also the only way to not accept an update is to power down the console by holding the button for 4 seconds (the user can’t back out of hitting I Accept w/o powering down)
– The settings menu pages can now be navigated with the – and + buttons.

It seems that quite a few people (myself included) are having trouble downloading this update. Hopefully Nintendo will have the problems ironed out shortly and we can all enjoy the new Shop Channel and knowing what time it is.