Retailing at $499, the Octavio 1 is the most expensive Zune speaker system we've seen yet. At twice the price of the actual Zune unit, the Octavio 1 can hook up a Zune, TV, game console, or DVD player and combines an 8-inch bass driver, two 5.25-inch woofers and 2 fluid-damped fabric dome tweeters all in one. Here's a photo of it in iPod white.
True to Zune form, the speakers ship with three skins, which allow you to go black or pink, too. Or you can strip them all off for the "naked" leather look. Ships now from Amazon.
After insisting the contrary with its first console, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has said that the Xbox is not just a game console but a "general purpose computer", as well as reaffrming the company's strong support of PC gaming.
Speaking to blog site Kotaku, Gates said that now that Microsoft has established itself as a gaming company, it feels more confident to branch out into other avenues such as the freshly-announced IPTV service for Xbox 360.
"The reason we got into Xbox was not just for gaming," Gates said. "It's a general purpose computer. In terms of the first generation in particular, where we were so known as a PC company, the need to make clear how we were prioritizing the needs of demanding gamers, that was super important."
"We wouldn't have done it if it was just a gaming device," he continued. "We wouldn't have gone into the category at all. It was strategically getting into the living room. This is not some big secret, Sony says the same things."
But despite the Xbox 360's new position as a multi-purpose home entertainment box, Gates says that PC gaming is still very much part of Microsoft's plans: "I can stick up for both the PC model where you don't pay any royalties, you can introduce games without asking anybody, that's a great thing. And you will see a lot of innovation".
"PC gaming is where you will see that really cutting edge high-end type stuff happening. As the Xbox gets cheaper and cheaper some very cool things happen there."
"But both of these models, even in the living room are still very, I think very important. The kind of openness and variety of the PC, and then the kind of very inexpensive deep integration that Xbox represents. Really bootstrapping off of video gaming but being far more than that."
Microsoft's Peter Moore, chief Xbox-exec and avid bicep tattooer, confirmed a plan to add video games to the Zune (Xune?) at CES yesterday. This would bring the Zune up to speed with the iPod's ability to offer games, albeit several months late. Moore said the Zune's large screen would provide a better platform for handheld gaming, gushing, "I love the interface, I love the screen." We know you do, Peter. We know you do. While this isn't quite what we were thinking when pondering a Microsoft-branded handheld gaming system, everyone's gotta start somewhere (we're looking at you, Zune). Of course, Peter Moore -- perhaps prematurely -- told BusinessWeek last year, "It can't just be our version of the iPod ... in addition to playing music and videos, a Microsoft device would include games." And now it will ... err, rather, it will in about eighteen months.
A tip like "omg its true. mys videl was really workin on teh zune linux." doesn't really inspire confidence -- in the story, or in the future of mankind -- but if this YouTube video is to be believed, it seems as if some foolio named "MysVidel," who can't even manage to get a camera to focus properly, has hacked up his Zune to run Linux. It could very well just be a video playing back on the Zune, meant to fool the casual viewer, but the button presses are well enough timed that we're willing to give this one a fair shake. Don't let us down, MysVidel. As for tipster -- our hope in you is lost already. Like always, check the video after the break.
It's official: record companies don't like you. After all that griping about signing up for the Zune music store -- and keep in mind that these record companies receive monies for selling songs here -- that resulted in Universal Music Group getting some sort of fat royalty check from Microsoft for Zune sales, not to mention whatever negotiations went on behind closed doors to come up with that ridiculously minimal "three days or three plays" sharing scheme, a couple of labels have once again gone out of their way to make life hard on you. It appears Sony Music and Universal Music Group are marking certain artists of theirs as "prohibited" for sharing, meaning that just because you've paid for a song, and even managed to find another Zune user on the planet Earth, doesn't mean you'll necessarily get to beam that JoJo track to another Zune via WiFi magics. In a non-scientific sampling of popular artists by Zunerama and Zune Thoughts, it looks like it's roughly 40-50 percent of artist that fall under this prohibited banner, and the worst news is that there's no warning that a song might be unsharable until you actually try to send it and fail. Oh well, maybe you can just hum a few bars or something -- just make sure the labels don't hear you!
A new version of the Dos emulator for the Xbox has been released. heres whats new:
Updated core to DOSBox 0.65
CDROMs can be real CDs or a directory on your XBox hard drive or an image file (ISO, BIN, etc)
IPX/Network/Modem support implemented (untested)
Added joystick mappings for the following missing keyboard keys:
Scroll Lock
Num Lock
Pause/Break
Print Screen
Navigate menus using the keyboard
Up = Menu Up
Down = Menu Down
Enter = A/Select
Escape = B/Cancel
Bring up the Options menu from in-game by pressing
Scroll Lock and Num Lock simultaneously on the keyboard
Brought XPort GUI core up to most recent feature set
New 10x11 pixel aspect ratio mode. Access it on the Video/Skin Configuration menu.
New option under "General Options" :
"Auto-Return to Launcher After Exit Game"
This will automatically return to the launching program after you exit a game. (Only happens if the emu was launched with a game via the command-line method.)
There is no save state or rewind support, even though it may look like there is.
Thanks to yet another Microsoft antitrust suit in Iowa, subpoenaed emails have revealed a moment of candidness and clarity at Microsoft in 2003 when Jim Allchin (Co-President, Platforms & Services Division, depicted left) and Amir Majidimehr (Corporate Vice President, Consumer Media Technology Group) had an email thread that basically summarized the portable media device playing field then, and for the most part, now. Some choice quites from the email back-and-forth:
Jim: title "sucking on media players"; regarding a current Creative player (probably a Nomad, perhaps a Zen Touch): "My goodness it's terrible... What I don't understand though is I was told the new Creative Labs device would be comparable to Apple. That is so not the case."
Amir: "Now you feel our pain." He suggests giving cash bonuses for partners that come up with decent devices. In the instance that doesn't work: "it is time for us to roll up our sleeves and do our own hardware."
And of course so they did, with great hype and great failure to immediately capture market share, the Zune was born many years later -- far too late by most accounts, but hey, you've gotta start somewhere. Still, it's funny to think that for these guys rolling up their sleeves and doing their own hardware means taking an off the shelve portable media OS (PMC 2), getting Toshiba to make a modified Gigabeat, and cutting some seriously anti-consumer deals with major labels.
So Microsoft's strategy for its Zune player is becoming clear. Just dig up what Register readers were talking about five years ago.
Having attempted to add "BluePod" features ("squirting" music between devices wirelessly) to Zune, Microsoft is now promoting another concept that may sound familiar to long-time readers.
On Saturday, Microsoft's media business chief Chris Stephenson said he wanted to see music dispensed by over the air "filling stations" to Zunes.
The British-born executive was addressing the Midem Music expo in Cannes. Stephenson said the best candidates for these digital dispensers - he called them "filling stations" - were retail chains that already play host to Wi-Fi hotspots, and named Starbucks and McDonalds.
We first wrote about the idea here. Pioneer Qwikker (formerly WideRay) set out providing infra red data dispensers at conferences at the turn of the decade, and now provides terminals for 700 hotspots, most of which beam over Bluetooth and target phones, rather than PDAs. London Underground plays host to over a dozen such "proximity servers" on the Tube.
Two years ago, Nokia blessed the concept, even ripping off Qwikker's name "Service Point". But Nokia's offering suffered the same fate as so many other good products from the Finnish phone giant, and died a death. Nokia has been talking about the creepy sounding "M2M", or "machine to machine" commerce for much of the noughties, without putting a successful product on the market.
Stephenson said Microsoft was looking for more ways for Zune users to "cache and download on the go".
Despite the mixed reception to Zune, Stephenson said Microsoft was reasonably satisfied with the progress of a product that wasn't even conceived a year ago. He pointed to the retail operation, rolling Zune out to 31,000 stores in the US. Sales-wise, there was less to boast about, but he said the media player had grabbed 21 per cent of the iPod Video category.
Asked about the Universal deal, where Microsoft agreed to pay a fee of $1 to the record label, Stephenson said "we felt it important to make that gesture". He declined to suggest to the audience at the world's biggest music expo that anyone who knocked would get a similar deal.
"There's nothing we're committing to in the long term," he said.
Asked about the choice of brown as one of the three Zune colours, Stephenson said that retailers had been more positive than the critics. Microsoft estimated 15 per cent of stores would want brown Zunes, whereas retailers actually ordered 35 per cent of Zunes in brown. The sell-through was higher than Microsoft expected, but lower than the retailers thought: at 21 per cent.
Repeatedly, Stephenson emphasised that Microsoft had Xbox-scale ambitions for Zune, which means a multi-year, multi-billion dollar commitment.
Microsoft has previously been cagey about the date for a European launch, but Stephenson said Q4 2007 was the target, although which markets would get a local Zune had yet to be decided.
The Dos emulator for the Xbox has been updated, heres whats new:
Configuration data for games is now stored based on the path in which the game is located. This allows you to have separate configuration data for, say, E:GAMESKQ4SIERRA.EXE and E:GAMESKQ3SIERRA.EXE Earlier versions of DOSXBox worked this way, but somehow that code got overwritten, so I've had to make a new method. Basically this means that you're going to have to reconfigure your games.
If you assign "Text Browser" to an in-game button combination and use it to pull up a text file, then when you do so the file that is automatically loaded is the same as the game name you selected plus .TXT. For example, if you selected to play GAME.EXE and the file GAME.TXT is
located in the same directory as it, then GAME.TXT will be the file you see when you press the in-game button combination for the "Text Browser"
Can manually enter the game name during the configuration process. When you do this, DOSXBox will create a dummy file in the same directory as the file you selected that is named the same as the name you entered. This is the file that you'll need to launch for future runs.
IMGMOUNT command now works the same way as DOSBox-for-Windows.
New configuration option "Enable IPX/Network". You need to set this to "Yes" for the network to be available.
New function on the "In Game Options" menu : "Change CDRom". This will allow you to change the CD while playing a game.
Useful for multi-CD games.
Fixed joystick-as-mouse problem in Gabriel Knight
Fixed EMS initialization error with games like Blackthorne
The Dos emulator for the Xbox has been updated yet again:
Heres whats new:
Previous joystick-as-mouse fix was affecting USB mice. This
is fixed. USB mice should work like they did in v9.
It was still possible to change software filters via the In Game Options menu. Software Filters are disabled in DOSXBox due to memory constraints. This is now fixed. (Meaning that if you try and change the software filter via the In Game Options menu, nothing will happen.)
Pressing the BLACK button on the game selection menu now properly deletes all of the settings files associated with a game.
When a new stub-file is created (when it asks for a game name) the directory is rescanned so that the file will appear in the listing. The stub-files have an extension of ".DOS"
A new version of the Final Burn Emulator for the Xbox has been released:
Heres whats new:
fixed a little mistake in the sound engine that caused some little cracks
rumble function rewritten so that it now uses only one .ini file and can be used with all systems (thx to IQ_132)
hsf2a driver added (thx to IQ_132)
scale3x and hq4x added, hq4x is unusable (10fps)
added native support for 720p and 1080i, the interface is now truely in HD
corrected some things in resolution selection (not necessary in PAL mode, widescreen mode automatically detected, now displays which mode is selected,...)
background now totally destroyed when launching a game, free up more RAM which can only be good for VMM and HD modes
