"It's still at least four months away from hitting the shelves, but using words like 'sleek', 'powerful' and 'sexy', Microsoft is doing all it can to hype its next big product -- the Xbox 360.

If you haven't heard much about this new video games console, don't worry. As Christmas approaches, the mass marketing blitz will begin and it won't be long before every adolescent, teen and a huge number of full-fledged adults will be eyeing up the hot new boxes in every toy and electronics shop across the country.

For now however, it's just hard core gamers -- who were out in full force at a recent press event in Dublin -- greedily eyeing a mock-up of the new gaming machine, which replaces the original Xbox. This time around however, Microsoft is hoping that the jewel of its Home Entertainment crown will oust Sony and its predominant Playstation device as the number one video games machine in the world.

If it's top notch specifications that will win the hordes of gamers than Microsoft is off to a good start: equipped with three 3.2GHz cores, a 500MHz ATI graphics chip, 512MB of memory and a removable 20GB hard drive, the Xbox 360's specs read more like a PC than a games console." [more]

According to this article MS will only have 25 games available at launch and not 50 or 100 as was previously reported.