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And yet, somehow, this guy still has investors lining up to dump money on his long running scam and these guys still seem to receive millions of dollars in venture capital, possibly from the Tooth Fairy who is at least as real as the product they have been hawking for the past four years.

I think you may be overestimating the intelligence of people who have money to invest. It seems that they are nowhere near as clever as we would like them to be.

So what if it is available in "product form" yet? It's not like a company would talk about something and never release it.

You should try using the Infinium Keyboard I found just by using it Google results in all categories improved by over 88%!!

I just put in my pre-order!

The Infinium hardware is Da Bomb. I was showing the specs to the guys in study hall, and they were all jealous that I already had it on pre-order. Then some girls at the desk behind us saw the pictures of the hardware, and they said it looked sexy! W00T!

P.S.
Chech out teh awesom website! W00T there it is!
W00T there it is!
W00T there it is!

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I think you are not giving Infinium Labs(TM) a fair chance. The company, founded in 2002 by Tim Roberts, is a shining example of what a gaming company should be. Take a few examples: When the company first announced a gaming console the entire community took notice gaining mention by many such luminaries as www.penny-arcade.com and www.hardocp.com They later developed a keyboard which is currently poised to change the way in which all people interact with computers; namely by allowing them to keep their mouse UNDER their keyboard. Sirs, we are living in a new century. An Infinium Labs(TM) century. Also, check out some of the sweet shots of both the lapboard AND the upcoming phantom at: http://www.infiniumlabs.com/

I used to accuse companies of such trickery, but then I got the all-new Infinium Labs Lapboard. What makes the Infinium Labs Lapboard very unique is that the keyboard can be angled upwards to create a surface for the mouse to operate on underneath. The Infinium Labs Lapboard is also wireless and can operate at a distance of up to 30 feet. That's more than nine metres of connectivity, which is great because I can play games like Battlefield Earth 1942 with my Infinium Labs Lapboard on my Microsoft Windows Media Centre Edition Personal Computer Powered by Gateway on my Gateway Enhanced Definition Plasma Television whilst sitting on my exquisite Ikea Spruengvar leather sofa. Check the Infinium Labs Lapboard out right away.

I used to accuse companies of such trickery, but then I got the all-new Infinium Labs Lapboard. What makes the Infinium Labs Lapboard very unique is that the keyboard can be angled upwards to create a surface for the mouse to operate on underneath. The Infinium Labs Lapboard is also wireless and can operate at a distance of up to 30 feet. That's more than nine metres of connectivity, which is great because I can play games like Battlefield Earth 1942 with my Infinium Labs Lapboard on my Microsoft Windows Media Centre Edition Personal Computer Powered by Gateway on my Gateway Enhanced Definition Plasma Television whilst sitting on my exquisite Ikea Spruengvar leather sofa. Check the Infinium Labs Lapboard out right away.

I used to accuse companies of such trickery, but then I got the all-new Infinium Labs Lapboard. What makes the Infinium Labs Lapboard very unique is that the keyboard can be angled upwards to create a surface for the mouse to operate on underneath. The Infinium Labs Lapboard is also wireless and can operate at a distance of up to 30 feet. That's more than nine metres of connectivity, which is great because I can play games like Battlefield Earth 1942 with my Infinium Labs Lapboard on my Microsoft Windows Media Centre Edition Personal Computer Powered by Gateway on my Gateway Enhanced Definition Plasma Television whilst sitting on my exquisite Ikea Spruengvar leather sofa. Check the Infinium Labs Lapboard out right away.

I used to accuse companies of such trickery, but then I got the all-new Infinium Labs Lapboard. What makes the Infinium Labs Lapboard very unique is that the keyboard can be angled upwards to create a surface for the mouse to operate on underneath. The Infinium Labs Lapboard is also wireless and can operate at a distance of up to 30 feet. That's more than nine metres of connectivity, which is great because I can play games like Battlefield Earth 1942 with my Infinium Labs Lapboard on my Microsoft Windows Media Centre Edition Personal Computer Powered by Gateway on my Gateway Enhanced Definition Plasma Television whilst sitting on my exquisite Ikea Spruengvar leather sofa. Check the Infinium Labs Lapboard out right away.

I used to accuse companies of such trickery, but then I got the all-new Infinium Labs Lapboard. What makes the Infinium Labs Lapboard very unique is that the keyboard can be angled upwards to create a surface for the mouse to operate on underneath. The Infinium Labs Lapboard is also wireless and can operate at a distance of up to 30 feet. That's more than nine metres of connectivity, which is great because I can play games like Battlefield Earth 1942 with my Infinium Labs Lapboard on my Microsoft Windows Media Centre Edition Personal Computer Powered by Gateway on my Gateway Enhanced Definition Plasma Television whilst sitting on my exquisite Ikea Spruengvar leather sofa. Check the Infinium Labs Lapboard out right away.

Don't worry, you can pass the time playing a game on your Phantom.

They've already come up with this; considered by many to be the only redeeming idea or product IL has produced. And I believe IL has explicitly stated they won't distribute it without the unit.

There is no "partnership." Total anti-NVIDIA BS some sites are putting on this. The fact of the matter is that IL is a customer of NVIDIA, as the machine has an FX 5600 in it. It also runs WinXP Embedded, so it's being demo'd at the MS booth as well as they announced a while ago (PDF).

it's a freakin' x86-based windows box... and you don't want PC games on it?

So what are they going to release then?

If you look at the website there is a video (E3?). In it they describe it will be subscription based at $24.95 a month and you get hardware free for 24 month commitment ($300 in first year?). If you go month to month it's $200 for the hardware. Because this requires a broadband connection only, there is a limited market for this product.
I can easily see racking up $68M just because of the massive amount of advertising and promotions required to break into a very tough market.

Such astroturfing is top-notch, the likes of which has not been seen since the Phantom Video Game Console. Penguin Putnam thanks all the gullible editors and saps who provided their free advertising.

Not that amazing - this company are able to make this product product without any known manufacturing facilities!

"With price tags from US$2,000 to $5,000, the market is luring heavyweights..."

I can't see myself paying that much for a gaming machine. I can buy a PS2/XBOX/GAMECUBE for less than 200 dollars. I could even buy all three and a decent amount of games for each system for less than 2,000. I know, they can only play games but isn't that the point of a gaming pc? I wouldn't want to put my gaming pc on the internet, because then I would have to worry about viruses, which means I have to install a firewall, virus scanner etc which would just slow down my game play. A gaming system works like it should. I don't have to make sure I have the newest video card, all games will work. It plays games with no blue screens, drivers to intall, or patches. Not to mention its easy to stick in my car and play where ever I can find a tv.

I just want my phantom console. :)

Infinium Labs is way ahead of Bill and Schwartz. But as we, all know the Phantom was built "By Gamers, For Gamers(c)", so this is not wholly unexpected. :)

Infinium Labs is way ahead of Bill and Schwartz. But as we, all know the Phantom was built "By Gamers, For Gamers(c)", so this is not wholly unexpected. :)

Well, Infinium Labs had one demoed at E3 for their console. I'm not sure if it works on a regular PC.

There's the which is nice (RF versus Infrared is always better). It has a built in thumbilina (thumb mouse).

Beyond that...Remote desktop via a Tablet PC works...

yep... 2500+. It even runs XP embedded... Specs here.

according to the infinium website, it's an XP 2500+. Here's a link to the actual specs.

Anybody with more information? Did they actually show anything that works? I wonder what this "Service" is!

plan to put PSP games up there for download eventually, too.

So, will it eventually be epoxy encapsulated a la phantom?

Another day, another example of the cavalier attitude that Robertson has regarding IP, the community, everything...

Michael Robertson is a strange creature, bucking the trend like Steve Jobs, but only in very, very bad ways. The funny thing is (funny in a really perverse kind of way), Jobs is generally the guy Linux zealots love to hate (he was the cool kid in school). Robertson is the Linux-popularising martyr for FOSS, the almost untouchable.

Back in the day, MP3.com was lauded as visionary, a chance for the music companies to make something of online distribution, and so on. When the RIAA poo-pooed this and went after MP3.com, he played the prima donna and we all boohooed together - Michael tried so hard, he really cared about us, he identified with us, he wanted to free intellectual property. He was on our side. When MP3.com died, defeat reverberated around the geek/FOSS world...

So then this thing Lindows appears on the horizon, with talk of full Windows application compatibility, something that was later dropped when the WINE team realised what a prick Robertson was. When any other company makes crazy claims like that, someone will get on the case. In this case, the Lindows team rewrote history to erase this little hiccup from their PR. There are murmurs on the Internet about how source is not posted and so on, but somehow Lindows carries on.

Then Robertson takes on Microsoft. Robertson is the Man again, the Good Guy fighting against every true geek's arch nemesis. When he loses, Microsoft are evil bastards beyond reproach (I am not suggesting that this isn't the case, but bear with me...).

I think perhaps this could be put a clearer way - ask yourself only "Is my enemy's enemy always my friend, no matter what?" Personally, my answer to that would be no, but I suppose YMMV. Put it this way, I have no desire to ally myself with a person whose sole motivation to free the world from the shackles of IP (which would of course undermine the GPL) serves only to allow him to continue to profit off the unpaid labour of others.

Robertson is not a visionary. He's the asshole who was never tough enough to beat all us Slashdot-reading geeks up, but never missed the opportunity to hurl abuse from just round the corner. And he strikes me as being from the same sort of management school as McBride - his ethics are about as loose.

iqu :s

...this?

You know, is it just me, or is that "middle east terrorist suspect" a priest? It's a sad state when a man of the cloth in a highly Catholic country (is it REALLY Mexico City?) is a terrorist...

And then there's the fact that it runs on OpenBSD (stolen from post below) and Windows 3.11 (wtf?) - I'm sorry, but unless it runs on MS/DOS 5.0, it's just not worth getting. Save up for something that's more "standards compliant."

A 3D rendered rifle, and the other product thingy on their page, also a rendering, and not a photo. Remind anyone of a certain vaporware system that we've seen before? **please don't sue me!**

"Looking further ahead, Reeves spoke about Sony's "ultimate goal" for PlayStation 3 - "to get into electronic broadband distribution"."

I hope to god Sony's attempt at online delivery is way better than Steam. *shudder*

Maybe they'll license some phantom technology from these guys instead!

Until the entire console is a single chip, the traces to the storage devices are all encrypted, and the thing is hermetically sealed with cyanide gas within

News Flash: Console player Infinium Labs unveils its plans for enforcing Trusted Computing

On infinium labs' website, they said they would be at the game developer conference Click here, then click on special events.. There was no sign of them anywhere... They didn't even give a keynote.. *shrug* Take this bit-of-info as you will.. =)

Maybe you haven't heard yet - 3D Realms has signed an exclusive deal with Infinum Labs and will be available only on the Infinium Phantom next-gen console. Sorry to disappoint all you PC-gamers out there...

I'm not sure how many people have checked out the other stuff on their site, but this looks like it has been built with RPG Maker 2000, and I'm not sure if it's even legal to seel games you make with that program. Anyway, this company just seems like a hack; they design a product, get in hot water because a large corporation claims it infringes on their patents, then release it as open source to misdirect things away from the fact that they are trying to turn a profit? Maybe Infinium Labs can learn something here; when their investors start screaming for a goddamn product, they can just say they released it as open source and are waiting for the magic to happen...

I'm not going to post my play-by-play analysis, but suffice it to say, I agree with you about one thing. Anybody who's interested should indeed do their own research. (and have a few good laughs and amazed slaps of the forehead while they're at it)

Sorry, me again. I've been poking around the web and I came across this Phantom feature document. There are some images of the console in there, and they almost look like photos except something's not quite right. Look at the connectors on the back, especially the RCA jacks. See any reflection from the metal? Me either. I think they're 3D renders. No sign of a real photograph.

Now that Google has removed SCO as the #1 hit for the phrase, might I suggest Infinium Labs for the title of litigious bastards?

I give up. I can't tell the litigious bastards without a scorecard anymore.

Okay, someone clue me in. Which litigious bastards are we supposed to be angry at now?

These litigious bastards ...
these other litigious bastards...
now these litigious bastards ...
or perhaps (and oldie but a goodie) these litigious bastards

Man, that's going to be an awful lot of HREFs to compile in my posts to talk about anybody on Slashdot anymore.

I don't think it's gaining any credibility. Picking up a major player in the industry doesn't mean much. 3D Realms has had sevral of them, and yet no Duke Nukem Forever. For that matter, once upon a time, John Romero could have been considered a major player. Didn't make Daikata any less bad.

Every time I see something that looks legitimate from Infinium, I go back to their games list: Misspelled titles and developers, games ascribed to the wrong developer, games listed several times for multiple developers (or for the same developer spelled several times), developers that have been out of business for months or years, games that were cancelled before release in the mid-90's, none of the flagship titles (more on these in a second, and not a single game released after the year 2001. For that matter, at least a third of the games on the list date between 1989 and 1995. And as for the flagship titles, they were touted to include UT2k3, Starcraft: Ghost, and Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. However, the makers of all three deny that they were developing for the platform, and didn't appear on the game list when it was finally released (and then retracted).

And if none of that sheds doubt on the entire operation, take a look at this. A lot of companies have done a lot of weird stuff, but I've never seen one buy itself out and then brag about acquiring their own flagship product from themselves.

It apparently has not only the capability to support an inbuilt cable modem, but an inbuilt DSL modem and a WiFi card. Check it out here for the 'official' (heheh) specs.

Note that all three of these are listed as optional components, so I guess you don't get them if you don't need them. Also interesting is that it apparently runs a modified WinXP kernel on an Athlon 3200+ and uses a nVidia nv36 DX9 compliant GPU.

The fact that it's potentially only a PC might be why no one has any dev kits yet... or it could be that it's a hoax. Whatever.

to stop hearing about that Phantom console and all of its associated vaporocity.

In seriousness though, if this ApeXtreme makes it so I don't have to blow all my money updating to that latest graphic FUBAR 5000XZ chip every time a new game comes out, it's definitely worth checking out. Especially if it's real, unlike the Phantom.

But I guess thats like saying Quake 3 beat Duke Nukem Forever to the punch.

I'll probably get flamed for this, but there flash site is cool (site). It's pretty convincing, too.

man, 60 million units is a LOT of consoles. given the choice of all that's out i would most likely go for the PS2... im not a big fan of consoles in general though.

that new infinium labs "phantom" looks to be a killer. /. has a lot of mentions of it as i recall. do a search. should be the first console ever that's truely upgradable.... not to mention it comes with not too shabby hardware. makes the xbox look like a toaster...

but back on topic, i wonder what a pile of 60 million consoles would look like....

I predict that we'll start seeing a change in consoles to make game development easier, rather than harder.

Consider, for instance, Infinium Labs' Phantom Game Console. There's no scheduled ship date yet, but having seen and touched one with my own hands, I'm sure they're not vaporware. It's just a small PC, with a 3 GHz p4 and 256 MB of memory, 100 GB hard drive, and high speed internet running on Windows XP (embedded?). The result? Games like Half Life, Quake 3, Doom 3, Wolfenstein already run. There is no added cost.

Of course, their business model is suspect (once the DRM is cracked, Infinium is basically out of business), but in the mean time, a 3 GHz PC built for games for $400 doesn't sound like that bad of an idea.

[sorry, screwed the pooch on the last post]

Isn't one PC game playing console enough already? This is just a bad idea in SO many ways. For one, PC games have never been plug & play unless they have been heavily modified for the box they run one which makes them propretary whether the submitter/company admits it or not. And sorry fo yas, but the words PC games and console are mutually exlusive, especially when one includes the word "patch", whci in itself implies, crashing, freezing stuttering and other bugs PC games are regularly shipped with. Speaking of PC games, how do these people intend on keeping up with the ever increasing demand games place on their hardware? After all, an Entry Model also implies other models will be availible as well. With better spec undoubtably and the same uneven playing field as a PC provides.

See? Yet another bastard PC gaming child that will crash and burn with the rest of them.

"Entry-level models will be priced from $299"

Isn't one PC game playing console /a> enough already? This is just a bad idea in SO many ways. For one, PC games have never been plug & play unless they have been heavily modified for the box they run one which makes them propretary whether the submitter/company admits it or not. And sorry fo yas, but the words PC games and console are mutually exlusive, especially when one includes the word "patch", whci in itself implies, crashing, freezing stuttering and other bugs PC games are regularly shipped with. Speaking of PC games, how do these people intend on keeping up with the ever increasing demand games place on their hardware? After all, an Entry Model also implies other models will be availible as well. With better spec undoubtably and the same uneven playing field as a PC provides.

See? Yet another bastard PC gaming child that will crash and burn with the rest of them.

"The PS3: 1543.2 games available from day one!" No other console maker could compete with a statement like that.

Well, there is one company who can compete with that. It seems the Phantom will have upwards of 32,000 games at launch!

Infinium continue introducing the 'Phantom', claiming that there are currently 32,679 retail game titles available and 418 shareware game titles not including; adult, casino, sequels and new releases of the past 6 months.

That is, if there ever actually IS a launch.

Although I can't locate them now, I recall mentions of "streaming games" and "trials" and "online rentals" of "over X0,000 existing software titles". While this is said to include PC titles, I keep thinking that old arcade ROMs would be perfect for this kinda thing.

Games you could play on a whim, whose ROMs are typically a few megs at most, often have high production values, are completed and tested... You could download them via the Phantom, and Infinium Labs pays the copyright holders a nickel each time someone presses "start" on Do Don Pachi.

I have the same exact question, I was on their site yesterday to see if they released any news, being how E3 just occured. I saw nothing new... Did anyone catch a glimpse of their booth? I'm fairly interested in first-hand opinions...

Did anyone see something about those guys?