Prepping For The 360

An anonymous reader writes "The Xbox 360 launches on Tuesday, and ZDNet talks to some of the folks who are already prepping for it. John Dvorak also has commentary on the new console, and he seems to like it." From the Dvorak article: "Luckily Microsoft's Xbox 360 crew, and other game developers, are working on cool stuff that will cross over to PCs. When game developers retake their rightful place on top of the hill of progress, we'll all be better off. Needless to say, I am impressed by the Xbox 360. The Xbox 360 explores new menu structures with a unique and pleasant GUI. One often-overlooked element that the Microsoft games group brings to the party is its unique GUIs that are unlike the folder/desktop metaphor that Xerox and Apple developed."

Comments

Long Tail media center

[BWJones]

Chris Anderson also got one early and is interested in the Xboox 360 from a Long Tail perspective as a media center.

Who cares what Dvorak thinks

[CokeBear]

Why should anyone care what Dvorak thinks? He is usually wrong in his technology predictions. He has consistantly, for the past 20 years, predicted the demise of Apple, and he hated the iPod, thinking it was a dumb idea when the first one came out. JCD is a shill for Microsoft, and not a very interesting one at that.

One Thing I Like

[MBCook]

I'm not planning on buying one yet (too expensive, no killer app for me yet), but i must say that I like the way they implemented custom soundtracks. On the XBox you could listen to your music in games (PGR2, for example) but you had to rip your CDs to the XBox hard drive. I've already done that to my computer's hard drive. I wasn't going to go rip my entire collection again onto my XBox. But with the 360 it can stream it off your computer from what I understand, or better yet you can hook up your iPod by USB and listen to the (non copy-protected) songs off that. When I played PGR 2 I turned off the music and put my iPod earphones in my ears and listened to my music while playing the games. Now I can do that without the earphones. I think that is great.

I don't know if the 360 can read the playlist info, but that would be even better. I doubt it (Apple wouldn't tell 'em, they'd have to reverse engineer it).

But this ability is a great little feature. It takes something that was too hard to use on the XBox (because of having to rerip my CDs) and makes it easily available.

Re:One Thing I Like

[Saige]

Yes, the 360 can read the playlist info right off the iPod. Heck, it even knows what you've named your iPod. I got to play with it back at the end of August, and everything was handled wonderfully with the iPod.