Is The Console Just The New PC?

It seems like every week we hear about another update to a console OS - like the latest 360 update which has bricked some units. We've got users trying to mod their 360 to be quieter. And some people maybe cracking open that shiny PlayStation 3 to have a bigger hard drive.

And I'm beginning to think - wait ... didn't I start to walk away from PC's because of this kind of thing? One of the things I rather like about console gaming is that ... it just works. What I bought is what I get and that's that. Soon enough, though, people will be hooking keyboards and mice to their PlayStation 3's and browsing the web. Heck, in time the PS3's browser might be running docs.google.com and people will be ... doing work on their consoles.

In fact, the PlayStation 3 is, in a lot of ways, what Sony declared it was. It's a new breed of console. It's not even really a console. You can run Linux on it. You can hook Bluetooth peripherals to it. You can upgrade the hard drive. It's a personal computer - plain and simple.

Even the Wii, which almost seems like a throwback in these terms, will be offering up Opera Wii pretty soon. Bill Gates once commented that we will be in an Internet age when we got to the Internet for information we would have normally sought out on the phone or in a book.

Yeah. That happened a while ago.

Now - what happens when we go to our console for something we normally would have sought out on our personal computer?







tagged: game, gaming