Quote: "The person behind Infinitum Labs does seem to be involved in bit of dodgy dealing "
He is no longer in charge of Infinitum Labs, Kevin Bauchus is; who is one of the trio that created the X-Box.
The Phantom doesn't look like the Cg rendering (even slightly); and is said to be upgradeable, but in the world of consoles that is actually a bad idea; because that breeds systems that will run some games but won't run others (incompatibility kills the whole point).
For $399 (Apex) / $199 (Phantom) what you get is basically a relatively powerful mid-range PC; something that would normally set you back around $1,000.
Both run on Windows Embedded, and both have TCPA style hardware; which means - no you can't change the OS. Even if you did this would void the warrently, which is just plainly stupid.
The Phantom comes with a Broadband subscription as part and parcel of the package; which is upto 10Mbit but i'm not entirely sure what thier basic broadband subscription package is.
(if it is 10Mbit for only $9.99/month that is far more than worth it! the only downside being the Phantom has no external drives, only a Hard Disk)
In terms of consoles, the PS3 isn't becomming any more multimedia based; basically because of what the European courts judged for the PS2... Sony have decided that the Satillite Reciever, Web-Browsing, etc, really won't give them any more income for adding it; so they're not going to now. Effectively the PS3 is now simply a more powerful PS2.
The GameCube Advance also happens to be just a more powerful version of it's predecessor; (same case as well) So really the PS3 and GCA are going to be the only 'true' games consoles on the market.
Xenon (X-Box2), Phantom, Apex & NVIDIA MultiMedia Center are all going for multimedia capabilities running on Windows Embedded/Media Center.
Basically whatever your PC does, they do, after a fashion.
Considering these x86 based machines really don't stand up against the power of the other 2 consoles; they are going to be left sorely behind in technology terms and pure raw power terms.
the only thing that sets the Xenon apart from the other x86 based consoles is really the fact it is using a proprioty format XBE, which is just different enough from Win32 to make it incompatible.
as almost everyone has a DVD player anyways; that old selling feature, really doesn't stand up with these new consoles.
i mean sure it's a nice feature, but i mean you can buy a GameCube + a Std DVD Player for less than a PS2 or X-Box... which means you can use both at the same time if you want.
i mean i doubt many people are going to be impressed featurewise this time, and consoles really are going to start going back to pure gaming machines (like the damn well should be in the first place!)
