No More Jet Engines on the XBOX

Microsoft’s strategy for gaming gains more traction as days go by. The latest announcement was about the new XBOX 360 console, a slim, edgy, all-black unit with a 250 Gb hard drive and built-in WiFi (finally!). Based on the official product shots, the unit packs the standard XBOX 360 AV port, HDMI, several USB ports, and a smaller power interface. Acknowledging the annoying loudness of the XBOX, there has been apparently a significant effort to reduce it to a “whisper quiet” operation. So, no more jet engines attached to the XBOX consoles. Finally, as a consequence of former announcements regarding Kinect (see my previous post), the new device has a custom Kinect port.

The real surprise came in when Microsoft announced the availability of the new, redesigned XBOX 360 as early as this week. From what it looks so far, the Redmond giant is on track with its strategy to gain the competitive edge in the game console market. Still, there are questions to be answered in the next few months which are critical to Kinect’s and ultimately XBOX’s success. I guess the most interesting of them all is “will there be games available by November that are able to expose the full potential of Kinect?”

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.