Kinect Bundles June 6, 2011 at 5:05 pm
There are two main kinect bundles available presently. The first kinect bundle has 4GB of hard drive space (perfect for those casual gamers who probably won’t be storing games on the hard drive and buying and downloading games and movies from Xbox Live).
The second kinect bundle has a 250GB hard drive, and is perfect for the hard core gamer who will also be enjoying what Kinect has to offer.
Xbox 360 is a truly great console with an excellent game library and revolutionary online play.The Xbox 360 Kinect with 4 GB is what the original arcade version should have been, and is definitely worth its $300 price tag.
Here are some of the new features of this model that I really enjoy.
1. New Valhalla chip – hopefully improved design to prevent RRoD issue, but tech. reviews noted that the Jasper chip in the older Elite model runs cooler
2. Wi-Fi N – this is the newest Wi-Fi standard that is 12X faster (up to 600 Mbits/ sec) than Wi-Fi G; you’ll need a Wi-Fi N router to get the maximum speed
3. Digital optical audio port (if your sound system is separate from your TV, then you’ll need this to get full 5.1 surround sound)
4. 4 GB of flash memory (although 1.1 GB is used by the game system, but 0.3 GB can be reclaimed by deleting 4 game demos)
5. It has 5 USB ports (2 in front & 3 in back)
6. A slimmer design with side vents (to prevent overheating)
7. A dedicated port for Kinect with demo game (also $50 cheaper than buying Kinect separately from Xbox)
8. Only 1 year of warranty (the only negative; older Elite models had 3 yrs.)
9. USB flash drive support (this is a Xbox software update released in April 2010)
10. ESPN video streaming (will be included if you are a Gold member, $50/ yr, which I highly recommend, you get the first month trial free.)
11. Free Kinect Adventure to get your kinect gaming underway.
The Xbox 360 250GB has the entire features above as well as the 250Gb of space to download and store games and if you are a real gamer the little bit of extra money will certainly be worth it in the long run. Each game takes 5-7GB to install, so the 4GB version won’t have enough space for installing games.
You also get Forza Motorsport 3 – rated “E” and Alan Wake – rated “M”, you don’t get Kinect Adventures.
Installing your games and maintaining proper ventilation are top priority to keeping your Xbox 360 as cool as possible. Not to mention the quicker load times and super quiet operation when actually playing.
If you already have the Xbox 360 Console and you only need the kinect sensor, then you cost will only be about $150, but if your Xbox is getting a little old, I would highly recommend getting one of the kinect bundles above as they are great value for money.
Leave a Reply