Microsoft has chosen the small hours of the night to announce pricing of its second Kinect bundle, which is set for launch along with the standalone and 4GB options on November 4 in the USA and November 10 across Europe. The new package throws in the 250GB slim version of the Xbox 360 to accompany the newfangled motion tracker, a spare conventional controller, and a copy of the utterly unmissable Kinect Adventures! (it has its own punctuation, it must be good). Pricing is a bit on the painful side, with Kotaku reporting a $399 figure for the US and Microsoft confirming to us a £300 sticker for this “special edition” bundle for the UK. Full press release follows after the break.
“Did you ever have to make up your mind / Pick up on one and leave the other behind?” I’m pretty sure John Sebastian was talking about ladies when he wrote that infamous line-still, he just as easily might have been discussing high performance gaming. In fact, had the song been penned in 2010, he may well have been.
Decisions are a tricky thing. When you’re going to plop down a lot of money for a new gaming rig, you’d better hope that you’re making the right one. Origin PC has made the decision a little bit easier with its latest rig, The Big O.
The tower has some pretty impressive specs, including an EVGA GeForce GTX 480 FTW graphics card, a six-core Xeon X5680 processor, liquid cooling, 6GB of built-in memory, a 12x Blu-ray burner, and a 2TB hard drive.
The PC’s “X-Factor,” however, is the inclusion of a built-in, liquid cooled Xbox 360. Says Origin, “Every Big O system is strategically modified so the Xbox ports are easily accessible with liquid cooled processors for extreme performance. You can even game on the Xbox 360 while your computer is busy dominating whatever other task it is assigned.”
This beast of a rig starts at $7,669. Someone get The Lovin’ Spoonful on the phone.
Oh, sure — we’ve seen an Xbox 360 enclosure stuffed with x86 innards, but we can’t say we’ve ever seen anything quite like this. Gaming upstart Origin PC has just shattered every preconceived notion about its potential with the Big O, an appropriately titled luxury machine that combines a liquid-cooled gaming PC with a liquid-cooled Xbox 360 Slim. In one box. A pair of base configurations are available (though customizations are limitless), with both of ’em rigged up to run the PC and Xbox concurrently. In other words, these bad boys can actually crunch SETI@home data while you explore the vastness of Halo: Reach. The $7,669 build includes an overclocked 4.0GHz Core i7-930 CPU, Rampage III Extreme mobo, twin NVIDIA GTX480 graphics cards, 6GB of Corsair memory, a 1,500 watt power support, 12x Pioneer Blu-ray burner, two 50GB OCZ SSDs wired up as a boot drive, Windows 7 Home Premium, a liquid-cooled Xbox 360 and bragging rights the size of Texas Alaska. For those still unsatisfied, there’s a $16,999 version that’s frankly too lust-worthy to spell out here (but is in the gallery below). Hit the source link if you’re feeling ambitious, but don’t blame us for blowing your kid’s college fund in one fell swoop.
Originally the fevered dream of Microsoft executives circa CES 2007, the Xbox 360 IPTV box is rapidly becoming a reality, first sneaking into Canadian carrier Telus’ Optik TV outlay and now reportedly in development at AT&T. Now, we wouldn’t have blamed you for doubting Microsoft when it briefly mentioned U-Verse subscribers would get Mediaroom functionality in their game console later this year, but it’s looking more likely now: a tipster just forwarded some legit-looking screenshots of Xbox prompts in AT&T U-Verse’s technical support database. Our source claims the Xbox is presently being tested internally with friends and family of AT&T employees, and that it’s likely only a couple of months away at this point. Not discussed: whether or not Xbox 360 will provide closed captioning for the “TV impaired.” See what IPTV on Xbox might look like in our January eyes-on.
Boy, we’ve gone from rumor to hands-on experience in just a couple of days with this thing. Microsoft’s November 9-bound Xbox 360 controller refresh couldn’t escape the clutches of Joystiq, who have put together a neat photo gallery and video overview. That chrometastic new D-pad is clearly the headliner here, and the early feedback is that it works well — it takes a bit of effort to transform from a flat button to the elevated four-way navigator you see above, but that’s apparently a good thing as it means you’ll never flip modes by accident in the middle of a hot and heavy gaming session. The analog buttons have also been subjected to some nipping and tucking and there is of course a new desaturated color scheme to explore as well. You’ll find a shot of the retail packaging after the break and a lot more at the source.
As beta testing programs go, Microsoft’s Kinect venture has been kind of… leaky. No surprises, therefore, that we’ve now received our first in-the-plastic pictures of the motion-tracking camera peripheral, replete with a few select shots of its packaging. Redmond’s promise that hardware was en route to testers was clearly not a hollow one, and we can now probably expect a bunch more unauthorized disclosures about the user experience with what should be final retail units. The outside of the packaging includes a couple of teasers encouraging users to pick up some of those bodacious PDP stands and wall mounts for their Kinect — presumably the start of a tidal wave of Kinect accessories.
Arc Touch Mouse Promotional Photo from Microsoft.com
Microsoft has made two new controllers — one for your computer, one for your XBox 360 — that can switch into different shapes depending on your needs or preferences. The well-leaked, much-anticipated Arc Touch Mouse is shipping now; the new wireless XBox Play and Charge kit will be out stateside in November.
Exactly a month ago, Microsoft Hardware teased their new mouse on Twitter with a partial image and a riddle/tagline: “Don’t be so touchy… flat is where it’s at.” Most people guessed it was a new mouse or trackpad, but as John Paczkowski noted, “the composite image also looks like the back of a smartphone or media player…or a remote control…or an electric razor…or a pancake griddle.” What was this new mystery device?
Well, it’s a highly mobile, lightweight, touch-sensitive mouse that arcs to fit in the palm of your hand while you’re using it and packs flat so you can stuff it in a pocket on the go. It’s targeted for laptop users who don’t like their always-flat trackpads.
In a press release titled “Think the Mouse is Dead?“, Microsoft Hardware’s Brett Ostrum wrote that even as trackpads and other input devices have evolved, the market for mice has only grown: “The reasons people need external mice will not change: comfort and precision.”
There are some nice concessions to the trackpad model here, though: the Arc Touch has a touch strip instead of a scroll wheel. Instead of a perfectly smooth drag, the strip vibrates to simulate to simulate a wheel’s click-click bumps. I hope you can toggle this feature on and off — I imagine some people enjoy, or at least have gotten accustomed to, the finger-on-glass feel of a trackpad or touchscreen.
(Here’s a promotional video of the Arc Touch in action. If only Microsoft could invent a Silverlight video that could flat-pack into HTML 5 for easy embedding!)
The XBox 360 has a new wireless controller, too, but its flat-packing profile tweak is more subtle. Its directional pad can pop up into a “plus” for raised directional controls, or snap flush into a “disc” for easy Street Fighter II-style thumb-drag joystick moves. (Sorry for the outdated game reference. I’m old.)
There are plenty of other nice things in this model, including wireless (of course) and a new silver-gray look. But I think the versatility of the d-pad is the real item of interest here. As we start using remotes for game consoles to do more and more things, whether as media players or web browsers, we’re going to want controllers that can morph to match.
Missing your oldie Xbox 360’s bright and airy white finish? Well, Microsoft’s still not willing to sell you a slimmified 360 in any color other than black (excepting the limited edition Halo gear), but at least you can gaze upon the singular example of what a white one may look like above. This seemingly repainted Xbox 360 250GB (to give it its official, and ridiculous, name) has been lovingly put together over in China and really makes us wonder why Microsoft is depriving us of such snowy good looks. Perhaps it wanted to draw a clear between the old and the new? Either way, hit the source for the cheapest way to peek an all-white slim 360 without giving the Colorware crew a call.
“If you see it, just say it,” says Microsoft’s Kinect, but only in the US, UK, Mexico and Japan to start — those are the only four countries that will support Kinect voice control by the motion-sensing peripheral’s November launch. So said Microsoft PR manager Lidia Pitzalis in an interview with Eurogamer Spain, adding that Germany, Italy, France and even Canada and Spain would have to wait for a Spring 2011 update for additional language support. Microsoft claims it’s a matter of accents throwing off the voice recognition, as the company’s already had to build separate software versions for US and UK English, but if you’re an Italian who can fake a good Cockney, you’re still out of luck, as Microsoft’s reportedly disabling voice control entirely in said regions until it can formally support it. And game companies wonder why we try so hard to hack those DVD drives…
Update: Canada will in fact have voice support, according to Microsoft. So long as you speak English and not French.
Hey, what’s this? We just started hearing rumors this morning that Microsoft was planning a new Xbox 360 controller with an improved D-pad, and bang — Major Nelson just went live with a YouTube video detailing the new piece. The new D-pad is a trick new patented design that’s just as we heard from Joystiq: it’s a disc in the normal configuration, but a quick twist raises the crossbars about a quarter-inch, making it eminently more usable. (That sound you hear is joyous weeping.) The analog sticks have also been tweaked to be slightly more concave, and — wonder of wonders — the ABXY buttons are now translucent monochrome instead of colored. Wild. The new matte silver controller will only come bundled with the Play and Charge kit for $64.99 when it launches on November 9 in the States and replaces the existing wireless controller — it’ll hit Europe around February. Yep, it definitely seems like a major upgrade, but we’ve got a couple questions: when will it replace the packed-in controller? What about all the people who just bought new Stealthboxes and got the older controller? And, most importantly, when can we have one to try out? We’re pressing for answers and we’ll let you know — check the video after the break in the meantime.
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