My son has an XBOX 360, got the external HD-DVD player from a workmate for cheap and was buying HD-DVD movies until last month, when the supply dried up.
He's slightly ticked off at backing the wrong horse, and we were talking yesterday about how the Sony PS3 with its built-in Blu-Ray player is the exact same price (currently) as a stand-alone Blu-Ray player. With Microsoft continuing to believe that people will download movies, there is no Blu-Ray option for the XBOXers.
Download movies? My son says Microsoft's online XBOX site has no movies worth downloading, partly because of our location outside of the USA. In any case, how many HD movies can be downloaded before hitting your ISP's GB limit?
At 15GB, mine is pretty high, but downloading a single season of a TV series is 7GB. I'd rather buy the discs, thank you.
Back to Sony's PS3 and its built-in Blu-Ray advantage. It really is no advantage unless you also replace your otherwise prefectly good tv with one that sports 1920 lines of resolution. And those ain't so cheap yet.
ARS Technica today posted the shipment numbers for gaming machines in February:
1. Nintendo DS -- 597,6000
2. Nintendo Wii -- 432,000
3. Sony PS2 -- 351,800
4. Sony PS3 -- 280,800
5. Microsoft XBOX 360 -- 254,600
6. Sony PSP -- 243,100
Overall, the Japanese gamer companies blew away their American counterpart:
1. Ninentdo --1.03million units (48% marketshare)
2. Sony -- 0.88 million (41% )
3. Microsoft -- 0.25 million (11%)
The small marketshare parallels that of Microsoft's share of search, and makes one wonder that if the convicted monopolist had to compete in the OS and office software markets, whether these products also would be in the very low double-digit range.
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