Last Friday, Australian technology site Smarthouse claimed that Toshiba (the owners of the HD DVD patents) were unofficially suggesting that Microsoft was working on a new Xbox 360 variant "in response to the PS3 driving sales of games software and Blu-ray content in several countries...a recent Sony Brand Wave study conducted in five countries including the UK, Australia, France Germany and Spain revealed that a key reason that consumers are buying a PS3 is because it includes a Blu-ray player."
Citing a "senior Toshiba executive," Smarthouse wrote:
Microsoft is working on a brand new Xbox that will incorporate not only a new HD DVD drive but a large hard drive and new entertainment software that is a spin off from its struggling media centre offering.
Microsoft has already waved off the claims. UK-based Stuff.tv talked to Toshiba earlier this week. Toshiba's response?
Toshiba has no comment to make on this matter. The Xbox 360 is not a Toshiba product.
And according to DailyTech, Toshiba added:
It?s got nothing to do with us. But we know Microsoft doesn?t want to include the HD DVD drive so as not to limit the user?s experience.
Which makes sense for the same reasons bundling a Blu-ray player with your console to force a standard down consumer throats doesn't. Making the player an optional add-on was always the superior strategy, which is at least partially why the Xbox 360 is beating the PlayStation 3 in unit sales, despite costing appreciably more in apples-to-apples comparisons.
How, exactly, is including a Blu-Ray disk player in the PS3 "forcing" a standard down consumer throats? You can choose not to watch Blu-Ray movies on it, can?t you? Developers may enjoy having more space on a disk to use for their games. I think it was a good idea to implement HD optical disk technology on the PS3.
The inclusion of gigabit and wireless networking along with a hard drive (user upgradeable) was also worthwhile. Sony did a great job in keeping the price reasonable even when including all the hardware to make the Playstation 3 a truly next generation console. I gets even betterwith the recent price drops.
Why would I buy any 360 model when the new Full HD XBox launches Q4 2008. It will have an internal HD-DVD drive (30GB MAX Disc Capacity) and internal WiFi. Still can't do what PS3's Blu-Ray can do but hey, way better than the current 360 Model. PS3 games are now coming with full HD Movies packed on the game disc. Stranglehold is the first game that will be released with a full length feature film on the game disc. That's cool. HD-DVD won't be able to do that but it's still way better than having a standard DVD drive. Thanks Microsoft, but I think I'll wait for the new XBoxHD to come out next year. For those of you who don't believe it's coming out - M$ retained the patents for the HD-DVD drive so it 100%. See ya next year!