bit-tech Shopping: Microsoft Xbox 360 Premium System w/ HDMI

Rating: 2

Time with product: 9 Months

Strengths: Excellent Graphics, Halo 3, Happy Children

Weaknesses: This unit died after 9 months of use. Crying child.

Summary: What a wonderful way for my family to spend time together in an evening, playing "Guitar Hero 3", or I and my son, playing any one of the "Halo" games. When the machine quit functioning, I dutifully sent it to microsoft and they shipped it back within two weeks.(what they shipped back was a refurbished unit, even though they state that they will replace it if it's less than a year old). No hard drive. I called customer support and they claimed that it never had a hard drive with it. They closed the case and now, I am having to wait for them to call me back after my third call to them. I?ve looked into replacing the hard drive and it may cost me $100 to $140. If you want to find out about Microsoft consumer relations, go to: http://www.consumeraffairs.com/home_electronics/xbox.html.My son cryed after I told him that we would not be buying any more xBox 360 games. We have a sony PS3 that we are very happy with so far that we bought for Blu-Ray. It has built in Wi-Fi and I haven't heard nearly as many nightmare stories about it.

Rating: 6

Time with product: 2 Months

Strengths: fully functional system designed to be the minimum for all the 360 has to offer.

Weaknesses: 20 gig HD fills up fast

Summary: well for all those people who complain about their very young kids having trouble playing without help. you should be watching your kids anyway video games arent babysitters. otherwise this system is capable and able to handle most of your gaming needs, however with the new live update coming out that lets you install games to your hard drive this system is not the one to have if you plan on taking advantage of it as the hard drive could only handle 2-3 games at a time and still have room for save files and downloaded content. i gave mine to my sister and bought my self an elite to match my color scheme and get the larger hard drive plus hdmi cable, i bought her a 120gig drive just to be fair to her for later use. :)

Rating: 10

Time with product: 2 Months

Strengths: Ability to hook up with HDMI cable

Weaknesses: Wireless connection is separate

Summary: We originally purchased the Xbox 360 Elite because it came with an HDMI cable and had more memory. We decided that we could purchase a pretty cheap HDMI cable ourselves and we didn't need that much memory so we returned the Elite and purchased the Premium. So far, it is great! We purchased the wireless network adapter to go with this and it hooked up to XBox live in a snap. It is connected with the HDMI cable to our 1080p plasma TV and looks great! We have wireless controllers as well and have no problems at all. We are very happy with this system.

Rating: 10

Time with product: 2

Strengths: Beautifully designed user interface, seamless integration of online content

Weaknesses: Wireless controller frequently disconnects itself

Summary: This version of the Xbox 360 seems to be in the sweet spot right now. The lower Arcade package is missing some critical features, and the Elite and Halo editions don't seem to be able to justify their price premium.I recently purchased both an Xbox 360 and a Playstation 3, and so far I'm more impressed with the Xbox. The whole experience is more seamless. I love the fact that games just update themselves when patches are released - amazing!Word on the street is that the Xbox 360 has a hardware advantage over the PS3, but it's hard to see this in practice. It depends much more on the specific game. My only gripe is that the "sleep" period on the wireless controller is mcuh too short. I'm constantly having to wake it up. In addition, the controller frequently disconnects right in the middle of game play. So far, all games have handled this well (freezing the action and popping up a "please reconnect the controller" message), but it could be very annoying/fatal for online play.

Rating: 10

Time with product: 6

Strengths: Online play, HD graphics, great games!

Weaknesses: RRoD

Summary: This console, like the previous Xbox 360 consoles, is still vulnerable to the "Red Ring of Death" failure, but with new heatsinks it is at least less likely to fail than previous versions.The built-in HDMI in this version is a great addition and a superior HD connection that makes 1080p possible on more TVs. Along with this difference there is the same thing that makes the 360 great in the first place - awesome games. I look forward to my gaming future.