It is not being fought with sofa cushions, but the battle for the living room is hotting up. The great white hope for consumer electronics manufacturers is that one day households will have just one box that fulfils all their entertainment needs. So far, no single frontrunner has emerged.
Rather, the current frontrunner is a rejection of the "one box" idea. Since its launch in December, Nintendo's Wii has leapt off the shelves at more than twice the rate of Microsoft's competing games console, the Xbox 360. Despite the 360's head start of a year, its total of 11m units shipped will soon be overtaken by the Wii. Sony's PS3 languishes in third, with less than 5m sold.
The cheapest and least powerful of the trio has stolen a march on the competition with an innovative motion–sensitive control system and a family-friendly approach. It has also, sensibly, not tried to be anything more than a games machine. Sony has suffered because its decision to bundle the Blu-Ray player, which can run high definition video, made the system very expensive – sales in the US only perked up when it cut the price tag of its cheapest machine by $100 to $500.
Still, these are only early skirmishes in the console war. Sony has shipped 120m of its previous system, the PlayStation 2, since its launch in 2000. Microsoft has a separate HD-DVD player add-on to go with its boxes. Both should benefit as the take up of high definition televisions increases. The Xbox 360 is also ready made to deliver television over an internet connection. If telecoms companies are serious about delivering films and programming on demand, it is not impossible that they will start giving the console away as the market develops. But until consumers actually start to ask for these features, the simple charms of Nintendo are unlikely to fade.
Read More :: http://www.euro2day.gr/
สมัครสมาชิก:
ส่งความคิดเห็น (Atom)
ไม่มีความคิดเห็น:
แสดงความคิดเห็น