February 4, 2006
Digital Home Magazine

Xbox 360: connectivity is king

If you can get your hands on one, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 could be the best digital home device you can buy.

Microsoft has been trying to get Windows PCs into the living room for years. Yet despite a Media Center facelift in 2003, the PC hasn’t been able to shun its complex IT heritage. Does your DVD player need to have anti-virus protection? No. Does your TV take two minutes to start every time you switch it on? Not unless you bought it in the 1970s.

Admittedly, the PC is constantly improving its friendliness. You could argue that it’s the most flexible device you can buy for a digital home. But this flexibility is also its biggest drawback. The fact that you can swap out a 60GB hard drive for a 200GB one and install new software means that there’s so much more that can go wrong.

The launch of the Xbox 360 last year hammered home the fact that the living room is no place for a PC. The PC’s raw power, massive storage capacity and flexibility cast it as an ideal digital media server. What the living room needs is a network-connected set-top box that does almost everything a PC can, without being a PC.

It’s why the Xbox 360 sums up everything that the digital home is about.