GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

Xbox 360’s long-awaited dashboard update is here, bringing a slew of new features, including a nice bonus from Netflix: an improved search UI and support for Netflix streaming on Windows Phone 7.

Let’s take the Xbox first. Xbox Live’s Major Nelson writes that the 360 dashboard update is available today and rolling out to everyone (regardless of your geography!) over Xbox Live.

That was penned this morning; if you’re reading this now, you’ve probably gotten the update. If not, signing in again might work, but bear in mind this warning: “If you keep signing out and then back in again, this will NOT force the updateit will only anger people on your friends list who will keep getting a notification. every. time. you sign. in…Be patient, everyone will eventually receive the update.” Well said.

The headlining features of the Xbox update are the new ESPN hub and Zune music. You’ve got to be an Xbox Gold subscriber to take advantage of most of them. Zune Music or ZunePass is exactly what it sounds like: subscription-based streaming music, with baked-in search.

The ESPN hub promises 3,500 live, on-demand and DVRed global sporting events from ESPN3.com annually. The selection is arguably stronger than any other digital set-top box: college basketball and football to US pro baseball and basketball and international soccer, golf and tennis, whether they’re in or out of your local market. No NFL or NHL, but sports junkies are one step closer cutting the cable cord. If only it could have rolled out in the summertime: we’d all be watching baseball, tennis and soccer and it would have taken everyone three months to notice.

ESPN also gets to leverage some of the Xbox Live social networking features, including group chat while you’re watching a game. (The chat software itself is also reportedly improved.) English Premier League fans won’t even have to leave home to heckle their friends. That is, assuming you’ve all got Xboxes.

And then there’s Netflix. Xbox Live Gold users have had discless Netflix streaming for a long time now, and it’s only been in the last few months that other consoles have caught up. Now the original Xbox gets an update too, with an improved search UI.

Plus, Netflix put a cherry on top: just like the iPhone, Windows Phone 7 is getting Netflix Watch Instantly too via a free application, which will be available at the phone’s launch.

One last Xbox 360 detail that I think is important: the new dashboard overhauls the parental controls and family programming settings. Netflix, Sports, Chat, Kinect, the casual Xbox games on WP7: all of these together suggest that Microsoft is strongly re-positioning the Xbox as a living room hub for the entire family, not just where college kids and devoted gamers blast away on Halo while their friends and families leave to do something else.

Some of those gamers are already reacting, saying that the new games for WP7 and Kinect are too watered-down, don’t offer enough of what they’re used to. I think it’s a really good thing, based on the premise that the value of any box attached to your television set increases proportionally with the number of valuable things you can do with it.

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Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

For the holidays, Sony is releasing a standalone Playstation 3 with a 320 GB hard drive, retailing $350. The same PS3 with a Playstation Move controller, Eye camera and Sports Champions game will cost $400; a standalone unit with a 160 GB hard drive costs $300.

The extra hard drive space is purportedly for games, video and other content distributed over the Playstation Network, but I’ve got to say that I agree with this Playstation Blog commenter:

You know I understand that with DLC content increasing at an alarming rate, we do need the extra space. What I dont understand is why you dont just keep all systems across the board with the same amount of memory and have consistent price drops (as technology gets cheaper) instead? 160GB would be ample space for most owners and for those who do a lot more downloading, Im sure those are the people fully capable and comfortable swapping out hard drives. Honestly if I were a basic user, Id prefer to spend $300 for a 160GB PS3 than spend $350 for a 320GB. It also causes more confusion for many non gamer types. What is the difference? Hard drive size. Really? Thats it?

Many other commenters point out that it’s easy to upgrade the internal hard drive of the PS3, making the savings relative to the 160 GB model nominal. On its own, the Move Starter Pack (controller, camera, game) costs $100.

Meanwhile, Nintendo’s offering bundled units at steep discounts and Microsoft Xbox is selling Kinects and new Xboxes like crazy. Either Sony’s margins don’t permit a price drop or they think they’re fine with the price points they have.

Offering a new package with a bigger hard drive makes sense if you’re cutting prices across the board. All this does is make the high-end bundle with the Move controller look like a marginally better deal.

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Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

It’s easy to dismiss Xbox’s new Kinect controller-free sensor as a “Wii Too” product.

But I wonder whether Microsoft is onto something much bigger, something that will take the innovations introduced for the Xbox into the broader sphere of personal computing.

Sure, from the perspective of gaming in 2010, it doesn’t offer much that Nintendo’s Wii doesn’t already have — as we pointed out in our review of Kinect in June.

But for one thing, Kinect doesn’t just record your movements. Its system of cameras, microphones, sensors and software algorithms also records (and recognizes) your voice, and can recognize faces and objects. For another, it didn’t come directly from the gaming and entertainment division at Microsoft, trying to copy the Wii. It grew out of Microsoft’s research labs, from a combination of teams already working on alternative input systems for computing devices. Gaming is a high-profile test case for their implementation.

Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft, told Computerworld on Thursday that Kinect “portends a revolution in the way people will interact with computers.” Bill Gates suggested something very similar at the D5 conference in 2007: The real transformation of the desktop metaphor for the PC would come through innovations in three-dimensional imaging. PCs and games were both held back by their reliance on the mouse/keyboard and the controller, Gates said:

[The Wiimote is] a 3D positional device. This is video recognition. This is a camera seeing whats going on. And, you know, in the meetings, like youre on a video conference, you dont know whos speaking, you know, theyre audio only, things like that. The camera will be ubiquitous. Now, of course, we have to design it in a way that peoples expectations about privacy are handled appropriately, but software can do vision and it can do it very, very inexpensively. And that means this stuff becomes pervasive. You dont just talk about it being in a laptop device. You talk about it being part of the meeting room or the living room.

For a useful analogy and some historical perspective, let’s go back to October 2001. On October 25, Microsoft released Windows XP, still the most popular desktop operating system in the world. Two days earlier, Apple introduced the iPod, the most successful digital music and media player ever. Over the next nine years, what happened?

One of Apple’s shrewdest moves in the past decade was to embrace the iPod as the technological and commercial driver of its core businesses. The iPod was universally hailed as the top device in its class, technologically sophisticated and culturally cool. iTunes gave Apple footholds in retail (first for music, then other media) and on the PC platform. It was the first post-PC device that along with digital cameras and video, let Apple remake the personal computer from a workstation into a digital media hub by way of iLife. Then, in rapid succession, the iPod begat the iPhone, Apple TV, and the iPad. Apple brought multitouch interfaces to its laptops, and now its desktops via the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad. It’s a huge, diversified company, but it all springs from the success of the iPod.

Over the same period, Microsoft lost a lot of its reputation as an innovator, especially in the retail market. It settled its antitrust case with the DOJ. Its web browser and new Windows OS were widely reviled. It tried (and largely failed) to get strong positions in search, smartphones, and music players.

But the Xbox is different. Critics and fans love it; it has sold (and continually grown) like gangbusters; it’s been widely perceived as both serious and cool; it’s had landmark games like Halo, BioShock, and Final Fantasy XIII; and with XBox Live it arguably did more than any other product to actually bring proper networked computing into people’s living rooms.

Apple’s iPod, and then the iPhone, have given the company a direction for the future: innovative cloud and boutique retail, selling handheld computing devices driven by multi-touch interfaces. It’s a very different path than if Apple had continued to follow the roadmap offered by the Mac.

If Microsoft follows the Xbox rather than Windows and Office, or rather than chasing after Apple in tablets or Google in search, we’ll see it become a company less defined by enterprise solutions and spreadsheets than by ubiquitous, large-scale, multi-surface household computing.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews