Xbox gets a facelift and Kinect

Microsoft held their E3 press conference the other day, as all games companies are doing this week, unveiling a new look Xbox 360 alongside the Kinect – the renamed ‘Project Natal’ – a motion control system.

The new Xbox 360 has a slightly sci-fi, sharp-angled appearance, featuring a glossy black case with chrome trim (how original!). In addition to a new look and being slightly smaller and lighter, the new system comes with a larger hard 250GB hard drive, a dedicated Kinect connection port, and built-in 802.11n Wi-Fi.

Kinect will be available with a bunch of motion controlled games this November, whilst the new Xbox 360 is out now in the USA and next month in Europe, at the same price as the current Xbox 360 Arcade system.

Go China! Or, erm, Italy?

As almost the whole world knows (some Americans possibly excluded), the FIFA 2010 World Cup starts this Friday. Whilst China haven’t qualified for this year’s tournament, Chinese blogger/model Lin Ketong is clearly already in the World Cup spirit.

Presumably she’s supporting Italy. We suppose we can look past that.

iPhone 4 predictably official

Yesterday Apple held their Worldwide Developers Conference, and as everyone expected, unveiled the iPhone 4. The real thing has turned out to be exactly like the leaked iPhone back in April. Although there were mixed reactions when the leaked version was first seen (some referring to it as a cheap Japanese knock-off), now that it’s official everyone agrees that it’s a thing of beauty, with the aesthetic stylings of a classic Leica camera.

So what’s new? There’s the 960×640 3.5 inch IPS LCD display, which the Apple marketing department are referring to as “the retina display” (a nice way of ignoring the fact it’s not a low-power, daylight-friendly AMOLED display like most other new smartphones). Under the hood there’s an A4 CPU, as seen in the iPad. Battery life has been boosted slightly, with 7 hours of 3G talktime. The camera has also got an upgrade, now with 5 megapixels and 720p HD video recording, plus a small front-facing camera. That’s your lot on the hardware front – memory and storage remain unchanged.

As you can probably guess, we’re not really blown away by the iPhone 4. Of course, the early leaked version did take some of the wind out of the announcement, although the incremental hardware upgrade – basically just taking the iPhone 4 to the same level as the HTC Incredible and similar new Android phones – leaves us a little underwhelmed. That said, many see the apps as the iPhone’s… killer app. So we’re sure it will still sell like crack-covered hotcakes.

Sunday Girl

With the FIFA 2010 World Cup starting later this week, our Sunday Girl (Han Ga Eun) is appropriately themed.

ASUS get their slate on with the Eee Pad

Clearly everyone is jumping on the tablet PC bandwagon, and ASUS are no exception, with their newly unveiled Eee Pad – an extension of their Eee PC range, rather than just a bad renaming of the iPad.

The specs are quite lustworthy. It’s a 12″ tablet with rather high quality industrial design, running Windows 7. Under the hood there’s a fairly powerful CULV Intel Core 2 Duo processor, which brings this into the realm of laptop horse power, although with much less power consumption (the ULV in CULV means ultra low voltage). Even with the high performance CPU a 10 hour battery life is expected. Not much else has been confirmed not he specs side yet, though there will be a built-in webcam and at least a USB port.

A chirpy little 10″ version of the Eee Pad is also in the works, running a different OS and presumably lower specs.