The successor to Microsoft’s Xbox, the Xbox 360 was the first of the seventh generation consoles to come onto the market. It offers a considerable increase in performance over its predecessors, with an emphasis on convergence - moving towards being your complete home entertainment center, not ‘just’ a game console.

Convergence can be a bad thing. Nintendo’s Wii, for instance, does one thing and does it very well. That doesn’t mean the 360 is the gaming equivalent of that combination toaster /digital camera/mp3 player. As well as a quality gaming experience, a fully kitted out Xbox 360 is a DVD player, a web browser, a chat room, a webcam, and, erm, a digital camera and mp3 player.

Let’s talk specs. The Xbox 360’s Xenon CPU clocks at 3.2 gigahertz and has a reputed  top performance of 115.2 gigaflops. The GPU is an ATI-chip called Xenos. The package contains two separate silicon dies, each on a chip capable of 500 MHz. The CPU and GPU share 512 meg of 700 megahertz GDDR3 RAM. The 12x DVD drive can read at sixteen MB a second, leaving the PS3’s 4.5 in the dust. So it looks pretty and goes fast. In practical terms, the 360 is good at lighting, particle, and blur effects. It’s not being outperformed in speed or graphics quality by the PS3.

The 360 can support up to four wireless controllers at once, as well as the accompanying headsets, and allows free roam within thirty feet of the console. It’s made for HDTV and six-channel Dolby surround sound - it doesn’t just support them, the games actually benefit from having them.

Every Xbox 360 comes with silver-level membership to Xbox Live. Upgrading to Gold for about US$50 a year gets you access to online-only content, world-wide tournaments, game downloads at the Arcade, live chat and networking - a whole social experience. With the success of MMORPG-style online gaming over the last few years, it’s no surprise that Microsoft have put so much emphasis on their online content. Just having been around for longer makes Xbox Live a richer experience than the competitor’s equivalents.

And just as Microsoft is constantly adding new downloads and releasing new accessories, they’re promising to take Xbox Live a step further with Live Anywhere. Demonstrated at the last E3, this will allow Xbox gaming cross-platform, onto PCs and mobile phones. Microsoft are promising that both Shadowrun and Halo 2:Vista will be Live Anywhere enabled. What that actually means in practical terms remains to be seen.

The Xbox 360 is in many ways a typical Microsoft product. It’s generally solid, but unexciting. It delivers a competent and rewarding experience, but there’s none of the innovative risk-taking seen with the Wii. It’s had bursts of widely-publicised serious technical problems, and Microsoft’s service and public relations for the Xbox seems to be on a par with that for their PC products. It should be surprising that Microsoft haven’t put more effort into making it backwards-compatible with more of the original Xbox’s games. It isn’t. There’s a rumour that Microsoft sent out the compulsory Fall Update to deliberately brick modded consoles. Whether that’s true or not, it has a horrible believability about it.

Still, none of those things have stopped people using Windows. The Xbox 360, as long as it doesn’t blue-screen, is pretty reliable, with just a slight tendency to over-heat with protracted use. The peripherals are all solidly built. There’s a huge range of good-quality games available, and a year after release, the 360 still looks pretty and runs well.