As everyone on the planet would know by now, Microsoft has revealed the design of the new version of the XBox — which they’ve called the XBox 360, which shows the marketing bods have won over the dev geeks, who I’m sure would have been happy to call it the XBox 2.0.

There’s a bunch of info on the hardware specs which make it sound suitably groovy, with the most notable thing being a move away from Intel CPUs over to the Power PC. Presumably this will give it more power for the money, which after all is MS’s money, since it’s not like Wintel machines where they just tell the manufacturers the spec — oh no, this thing they have to build themselves, so they’ll want it to be as cheap as possible.

There seems to be no official word on XBox 1 compatibility with this thing, though evidently a user survey hinted that the 360 would play the old games. They must have some pretty good brains working on getting that going, but then I suppose these days you can run PC software on Macs using Virtual PC, so software Intel emulation on a PowerPC isn’t anything new.

And the price and availability? Well they’re saying end of the year for US and Japan (and Europe???). The rest of us will have to wait for sometime next year. With the price of the console likely to be about double what an XBox costs now, it remains to be seen if the games for it will really blow people away enough to shell out for it though.

Hey I wonder if, unlike the PS2, it’ll stand up like in all the pictures without you having to buy an optional stand?