Hopes are running high for products that Apple will unveil at its developers conference next week. Rumors about new iPhones, upgraded MacBooks and a highly anticipated touchscreen tablet abound, and there's even gossip about a possible partnership with Verizon.
Steve Jobs Ready to Return to Apple: Report
Naysayers, time to eat your hat. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, is ready to return to the helm of the Cupertino, CA based technology company, as scheduled, by the end of June.
Who won the E3 keynote face-off?
ALL the opening salvos of E3 2009 have been fired from Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sonyso which console won the hearts of gathered crowds?
If we were judging by celebrity factor, Microsoft would win hands down. They poured on the celebrity sauce, offering Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono, Olivia & Dhani Harrison, Tony Hawk, Steven Spielberg, and Felicia Day, plus superstar game developers talking up their latest work. Meanwhile Nintendo and Sony stuck with their corporate chiefs to deliver the news on why their consoles were going to rock our worlds.
After opening with a special intro featuring new details and videos from the upcoming The Beatles Rock Band game (not an Xbox exclusive), Microsoft started its discussion by declaring it would skip the traditional business facts and figures talk in favour of getting straight to the cool stuff. It was then one new title after another, featuring lots of first-look trailers and demos from eagerly anticipated games. Plus new entertainment services, as well as integration with services like Facebook and Twitter.
Pic: Reuters
Then the bombshell â€" Project Natal. Rumours had been circulating about a 3D camera interface, but it turned out to be much more than just a Playstation EyeToy on steroids. The project also includes face and voice recognition systems, as well as features for ‘scanning’ objects and images from the real world and placing them into the virtual game world. From basic gestures to control the Xbox interface to interactive painting and exercise games, Project Natal offers something that â€" if it really works â€" could bring real change to the living room.
By the end of the Microsoft press event, everybody was asking whether Nintendo and Sony could reach the same level of wow factor.
Nintendo was next and for the first time in the Wii generation they failed to leave people hyped about their new ideas. It’s hard to keep dropping jaws when you’re so far in front, and this was the keynote that felt the most like a game of buzzword bingo. Nintendo talked ‘innovation’, ‘depth’, and ‘new experiences’. But what they had to offer were new Mario and Metroid games as the main points of excitement. A new Vitality Sensor peripheral â€" essentially a pulse monitor â€" was touted as a new device to bring great new wellbeing to Wii owners. After the initial feeling it may have been a clever joke passed, it seemed like Nintendo was heading toward another Wii Music misstep.
Any other year Nintendo’s new Super Mario Bros Wii and Metroid: Other M announcements may have been enough to excite the crowd, but people hoped for more and with Microsoft’s Project Natal still ringing in the ears it simply wasn’t enough to win the day.
Sony needs Playstation to have a very big year, and by the end of its event the crowd seemed to agree Sony had brought its A-game and were looking good for the year ahead. There was a big focus on support for the PSP as well as updated hardware, the PSP Go. A mass of big games for both the PSP and PS3 showed there is a lot in store for fans, and then Sony showed that they too had an advanced motion control system in the works.
It’s a wand technology developed by the team behind EyeToy, and their tech demo on stage was undeniably the most finessed motion control system we had yet seen. The wand delivered one-to-one tracking of the wand, and when the user held two wands they could perform both fast and delicate movements with precision, even writing on screen with pen-like accuracy. Like Project Natal, this appeared to be a step ahead of the Wii remote.
The battle lines here are whether the new motion-control-loving crowds will prefer no controller at all or a precision device in hand.
Who would have thought we could arrive at a point where all three platforms would have advanced motion control systems on offer? Or that Nintendo would have had the least inspirational opening event of the show?
One thing is certain. 2010 looks like it will be a very interesting year in the history of video games.
Séamus Byrne is the host of Midnight Update
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