I bought the PSP on launch day and recently started noticing that in order to charge it I had to wrap the cord around the PSP as shown below.

I noticed new AC power supplies cost around $35. Anybody else had this problem and have a different suggestion besides buying a new AC adapter? I can charge from the car without having to do this so my thinking is it is the yellow female plug on the adapter that is the issue.

Flickr has thousands of pictures tagged with Xbox 360, unfortunately some pictures (untagged and tagged) do not paint the machine in a very positive light.

Meanwhile, Reuters is reporting that Microsoft is taking a bath on the retail price:

The firm estimated the total cost to manufacture and test a premium Xbox 360, the software giant’s sleek and powerful new gaming machine, which debuted on Tuesday, was $552.27, compared with its retail price of $399.

It isn’t uncommon for console gaming hardware to be sold at a loss with the plan that the games will make the company a profit down the road. In the case of the Xbox this never really happened with a reported loss of $4 billion dollars. Microsoft is hoping the 360 will turn the tide, but they certainly aren’t off to a great start with underwhelming shipping numbers, glitches and system crashes.

Oh, and if you haven’t heard, it took a mere 24 hours for the pirates to climb aboard and rip the data off of Call of Duty 2 — believe it or not.

How long for homebrew gaming? Linux running? I don’t know much about the Xbox 360 Arcade, but it would be really cool if any developer could submit games legally to be available via this channel.

This anti-crash tip for the Xbox 360 comes via Goldenyemaster:

My 360 was crashing a lot (like once every 20 minutes). So I took the power supply off the ground and suspended it in the air with some string. I have been playing for about 3 hours straight and no crashes so far! … I found an easier way to do this. I got a box with no cover and put the power supply on the edges.

This tip sounds a bit hokey, but I suppose it does open up more circulation around that juice brick. Maybe this will help the unlucky 360 gamers out there experiencing crashes and freezing.

A long term fix though is offered by Molly O’Donnell, a spokeswoman for Microsoft’s Xbox division, via Yahoo News:

O’Donnell urged anyone with Xbox problems to call 1-800-4myXbox or go to http://www.xbox.com. If the problems can’t be resolved immediately, Microsoft said it will pay to ship the console overnight to a repair center, overnight it back once it’s fixed, or ship a replacement.

A flying power brick definitely sounds cooler though.

Just got back from visiting every major retailer on South Hill in Puyallup, WA this morning and they were all sold out as soon as they opened. Some opened earlier than their posted time like Best Buy that said they’d open one hour early (9am instead of 10am) and actually opened like 8:45am.

Last night around 6pm PST the Best Buy had some 40 people already waiting outside, fully prepared to camp out. This morning at 8:30, some 30 minutes before the opening there was a line of 60-70 people outside.

Wal-Mart
Rumour is they had 15 units and handed out the “golden tickets” way early. They were sold out before anybody could even wait in line. Didn’t see any campers.

Best Buy
Sold out — the word is they had 60 total units and overnight campers.

Target
Sold out — no idea how many units they had, unknown on campers.

Toys R Us
No idea how many units, sold out, unknown on campers.

Fred Meyer @ 176th.
They had 12 units, sold out. Overnight campers

Megastore (CompUSA + Goodguys)
6 premium, 6 core, 12 total units sold out. Overnight campers.

Costco
Opens one hour early for business executive members, but the line outside was at least 50 people. Not sure if any of them were overnight campers or not.

Wonder if somebody has thrown together a program to keep track of where to buy an Xbox 360? I’ll have to hunt around. That might be a cool mapping program to throw together. Sort of like Gasbuddy, it could be Xbox360Buddy.

Last night we did stop by Best Buy around 6pm PST and preordered two Xbox 360 games: DOA 4 and Perfect Dark Zero.

We are loading into the car right now and on our way to buy a unit, if we can. We didn’t preorder the hardware, as I’ve written before, so the next time I check in I should have hard data on how available the system is in our area of the world anyway.

Wish us luck!

My friend, Francisco just called from inside his local Walmart in North Carolina and they had a “line of about 60 people” waiting in the layaway section. They were feeding these gamers with Subway. That’s pretty cool as we have McDonald’s in our local Walmart. He said that there were only 25 premium pak systems to sell out and they will easily sell there. It was only 6pm EST so those people in line still had six hours to wait to buy those 25 systems.

This is the first eyewitness account I have on the true Xbox 360 retail sales situation. I’m curious if this will become a common story as the hours go on? We will be going out either tonight and/or tomorrow to attempt to buy one. Still unsure how this is going to go, but I’ll soon be able to report firsthand if there is a shortage or not in our area. I’ve created a special Xbox 360 category here for this coverage. I’ve already braced our kids that we might not be able to buy one of these just in case.

Microsoft plans to sell three million Xbox 360 in the first 90 days of their worldwide launch. Eight more hours to go!

Last minute speculation continues to abound regarding whether or not there will be enough Xbox 360 units to go around on launch day starting at midnight tonight.

I read over at Joystiq that some people are already starting to line up. We’re still batting around the idea of hitting the store tonight to see if we can bag the premium pack.

Thelongtail.com has an early review of the Media Center extender capabilities:

Interestingly, you don’t need to have a PC running Windows Media Center edition to get some of this functionality. The Xbox 360 has its own music player (complete with trippy visualizations from the famed Jeff Minter) that can stream music and photos from any Windows XP PC.

Are you kidding?! Jeff “Yak” Minter on the Xbox 360?! Right on. I did a interview on my weekly radio show with Jeff Minter in June 2002 (show #101), the guy is a genius with the trippy visuals and is the brains behind the Jaguar and Nuon updates of the classic game Tempest. Now I’m going to have to go run down that interview and listen back to it to see if he laid down any clues. At the time he was releasing some games for the Pocket PC, so this hookup makes a huge amount of sense, especially to those who have ever played any of his outstanding games.

Just watched this piece on internet gambling on 60 Minutes and the MGM and other casinos want to get into the internet gambling scene. If I heard correcty, an estimated 80% of the online gambling is coming out of the United States where it isn’t legal.

Basically the terrestrial casino point of view: if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. One comment I found particularly curious: that when the US gets an “enlightened” President and Attorney General internet gambling will be regulated, taxed and legalized.

I believe the wheels have already begun to turn and wrote about this in August where Wireless gambling was approved in Nevada.

More supply rumors are abounding with the pending Xbox 360 launch to go along with a few so-so reviews. From what I’ve read so far, those who have played the system on an HDTV — the way it is designed to be played — have been impressed with the visuals, but lukewarm on the games. The biggest games-related strength? The same thing Xbox does well now: Xbox Live.

A CNET commenter, Brian Dieckman, describes this as Microsoft’s “incremental improvement” strategy:

The Xbox is simply a hardware version of this same strategy, except this time, the “bug fix” (small incremental improvement)
is hitting your wallet.

In typical commenting fashion, another commenter, Daniel Desy, totally disagrees:

The XBox 360 is not an incremental improvement, but a huge
improvement in terms of actual technology used. The first
generation games never show what a console can do, and they
sure don’t here! The XBox 360 has a ton more processing power
than the previous one, a half gig of truely high speed RAM, and
a good graphics architechture.

The pre-release ying and yang continues.

I finally played the demo Xbox 360 unit with Call to Action 2 at Best Buy the other day and the picture was gorgeous. The gameplay? It was ok for the brief amount of time I played. Graphics aside, it didn’t seem like a game I couldn’t already play on the PS2 or Xbox, but no game can or should be judged on five minutes of gameplay, so I’ll hold off until I can play some Xbox 360 games for hours instead of minutes.

GameSHOUT members went around to the following stores in local cities and states and the numbers they were told were being shipped are as follows:

EB Games: Zero (other than preorders)
GameStop: Zero (other than preorders)
Circuit City: 30-40 each store
Best Buy: 40-50 max

Each of the Wal-Mart smaller stores only received 3 Xbox 360 units. The Wal-Mart super centers received a total of 10, which 7 are the full Xbox 360s, and 3 are only the Xbox 360 cores.

This whole shortage hardware game is a tricky one to play. If the supply is inadequate and thus the demand high then the people making the most money on systems will be those who resell systems on places like eBay. If supply is greater than demand, then the hardware must sell itself, which with a lineup of games that is more about sequels than anything else, could prove to be a tougher sell. However, I’ve seen a few people say they are going to be using them as a Media Center extenders.

Do not underestimate the X-mas factor
In my past launch day experiences most of the first wave of console buyers are hardcore gamers. The PSP, that was released at the end of March was no problem buying at several stores on launch day. However, the timing of the Xbox 360 launch enters another factor that considerably impacts the situation: the X-mas factor. With the holiday season upon us, there is no telling how many parents will be scrambing to the stores hoping to solidify the Xbox 360 early to put under the tree.

Things could get very interesting this coming Tuesday. How many readers will be out there trying to get their hands on an Xbox 360 on launch day?

2 1/2 days left!

8-bit Joystick Jake recently learned something disappointing about the Xbox 360:

First of all there is no way to transfer over your old save games from an Xbox 1 to an Xbox 360 with a hard drive so even if your games do play you can’t move your old save files over and you are going to have to start from scratch. There is no way to move them over via a memory card or over the ethernet ports. Your saved games will live and die on that old Xbox. I heard it on Xbox Live own Major Nelson’s podcast.

Doesn’t sound like Jake is going to be springing for the 360 at launch. I hear what he is saying about backwards compatibility but he is doing better with 39% compatibility compared to our abysmal 7.8%. I don’t have much in the way of saved game data so this isn’t a big deal for me, but our middle son plays all the time so I’ll have to see how he feels about this one. I’m sure it won’t kill his momentum for (hopefully) getting the 360 next Tuesday.

Six more days!