USB Storage Headed to Xbox 360

In the current age of video gaming, gamers are no longer drawn to their preferred console solely based on graphic potential and exclusive games.  Today's consoles center around some of the same ideas but are much more extensive: downloadable content, both game updates and complete games, firmware updates, movies, music, and more.  With all of this data coming in the form of software downloaded from the web, the need for disk space in a console has become much more important.

Microsoft's Xbox 360 has not been at the forefront of the memory game, requiring consumers to purchase expensive memory devices and hard drives.  In a report by Joystiq, a screen shot shows that the a future software update to the Xbox 360 may allow for external USB storage.  The solutions will only allow for two devices to be set up, each of which can be a maximum of 16GB.  This only amounts to 32GB of extra storage, but storage that can be used for anything you would use a hard drive for.

In the future, Joystiq has speculated that the images of an Xbox 360 with a slimmer motherboard  may be a new iteration of the Xbox that may come without slots for memory, just USB ports.

Microsoft's CES Showing Underwhelms

The only reason I'm posting this is because technically, it is big news since Microsoft is a technology juggernaut, but I'm thoroughly underwhelemed with Redmond's presence at CES. What did they have to show this year? Some flat PCs. Great. Thanks. Now, to be fair, I didn't expect much of anything at all, but please at least make me feel like there's some kind of innovation happening here.

I was half hoping Ballmer would hit the stage and pull a "Jobs" with "One More Thing", but no such luck. If you want to check out the full details, feel free to click through to the releases, but suffice it to say, I'm not surprised we've got very little to talk about on the Windows front.

On the other hand, we finally got a ballpark release date for Project Natal, the motion tracking new camera control scheme devised for the Xbox 360. The device is said to his stores at the end of 2010 in time for the holidays. Again, click through to the press releases for the details.