Into Tech

It all started a few days ago when a scanned page from a forthcoming Woolworths catalogue showed cheaper Xbox 360s and now, in uncharacteristic fashion, Microsoft has confirmed that European Xbox 360 price cuts are imminent.

From September 19, the Arcade unit drops to £129.99, the Premium version with 60GB hard disk drive drops to £169 and the top of the line Elite with 120GB HDD costs £229.

As we pointed out yesterday, that makes the Arcade and Premium Xbox 360s cheaper than the Wii. Let’s hope Nintendo takes note. Overall, gamers can expect to save £30 on each console if they hold off until the end of the week.

The second expansion pack for the ridiculously successful World Of Warcraft online game, Wrath of the Lich King, has finally been given a release date for Europe and the US: Nov 13.

The first trailer has been around for more than a year but, as usual, Blizzard has taken its own sweet time about following up the first expansion, The Burning Crusade. Still, when you have more than 10 million gamers paying you around £10 a month, you afford to be cocky and, to be fair, take time to get it right.

Wrath of the Lich King opens up the “cold, forbidding continent of Northrend”, and gives you a chance to go up against Lich King Arthas from the Warcraft 3 series. The Level Cap will jump from 70 to 80, there’s lots of new beasties, and you get the chance to play as a Death Knight - the game’s first Hero Class. There’s also a new achievement system, expanded player-vs.-player combat options, siege weapons and destructible buildings.

The one thing many gaming peripherals companies are trying to do is to make the gaming experience more immersive.

From lighting and sound to mind-controlled games and force-feedback vests, everyone is hoping to break into the mainstream with something that brings games to life by upping the sensory ante.

The Cocoon proposes a big leap indeed but, it will not be for everyone since this thing will probably cost more than your house.It’s a virtual reality (VR) pod designed for many uses, including games, with full 3D sound, a wrap-around surround display and a software interface a la Minority Report, whereby your gestures amd movements control what is being watched or played.

If the iPhone isn’t stylish enough for you and you really want to show up all your other plain iPhone friends, then dig deep into to your wallets and get yourself one of these Black diamond 3G iPhone 16GB ones instead.

For those of you for whom the iPhone is already too expensive then I suggest looking away now.

This month’s report on O2’s trials of mobile-phone based Near Field Communications services has been followed up by a more thorough analysis of NFC by Juniper Research, along with global predictions and timescales for adoption.

O2’s quote that ’six months would be optimistic’ for widespread integration seems like quite the understatement, as the study reveals that it’s unlikely to be fully adopted by a mainstream market until 2011-2013.

It’s pretty rare for Creative to release a new product without turning it into a whole family of devices of all different shapes and sizes.

We were anticipating more additions to its X-Fi range then, but rather than an MP3 player in its own right, the new Sound Blaster X-Fi Go! is instead designed to bring enhanced audio to a notebook or PC, rather like the X-Fi Surround 5.1.

Samsung seems to have been quite active in the Blu-ray market recently, with director Andy Griffiths commenting on the future of the format on the same day it announced the release of the BD-P2500 player.

Its latest flirtation with everyone’s favourite disc-based HD medium comes in the form of a notebook aimed at multimedia users with enough extra features to offer an impressive all-round solution.

The holy grail of projector technology is not HD but making projectors small enough to fit inside your pocket or, even better, inside a mobile phone.

DLP inventors Texas Instruments have been pushing a tiny one around the various trade shows but now, from left field, 3M is about to launch the first actual pico projector in a few weeks.

On September 30, the MPro110 mini projector, looking like a mobile phone, goes on sale in the US first for around £190. Even Optoma should be caught hopping on that one.

Since everything these days is an iPhone killer/challenger/beater, then the above phone must be the Asus entry.

Called the Glaxy7 [a.k.a. Zest], it looks a lot like the Samsung Omnia and also runs Windows Mobile 6 and comes equipped with a 5MP snapper.

You can’t help but notice and smile at that whopping display which is said to be a 3.5in, 800×480 pixel resolution screen with in-built accelerometer.

You can never have enough storage and Seagate knows this better than most as it rolls out its latest generation of FreeAgent external and portable hard disk drives.

Sitting at the top of the heap is the drive above, the 1.5TB FreeAgent XTreme drive with eSATA, FireWire 400 and USB 2.0 connection options.

Those working with whopping HD files and graphics will be impressed with the 3GB/sec transfer rate via the eSATA hook-up. The range also includes a 500GB, 640GB, and 1TB drives. Prices [US] start at around £90 and will run to around £165 for the 1.5TB monster.