This blog post references my article 'Got game? Living-room consoles grapple for consumers eyeballs, wallets' in the December 16, 2005 issue of EDN.

My terrific editing team back in Waltham, MA worked with me to fine-tune the article all the way up to early December, so it's still pretty up-to-date as published on the 16^th. Just a few things to point out:

• The Xbox 360 did indeed launch in all three primary geographies (the United States, Europe and Japan) as scheduled. It's sold out in the first two (due in part, it seems, to inevitable early production yield shortfalls from chip suppliers....don't panic, frantic shoppers, 300,000 more systems are reportedly enroute); enthusiasm in Japan, where Nintendo and Sony are dominant, has (not surprisingly) been more muted. Xbox backwards-compatibility upgrades are steadily flowing out of Redmond, WA, albeit with minor hiccups. Meanwhile, hackers are busily working on revealing the console's secrets.
• Some more tantalizing tidbits (unconfirmed by Nintendo) on the Revolution have leaked out, reinforcing the point I made in my article that the company is taking a very different tack than Microsoft and Sony. The references section of my print article provides a link to the promotional video Nintendo released when it unveiled Revolution's controller (a very cool clip; I highly encourage you to check it out), and a Nintendo enthusiast has published a conceptual follow-up.
• Sony claims it's still on track to launch the PlayStation 3 somewhere next spring, although skeptics (myself included) remain unconvinced that the U.S. launch will happen before the fall of 2006, and that the company will be able to assemble a compelling and abundant suite of titles before 2007-or-beyond. However, the company's desire to get a low-cost Blu-Ray player into the market may force its hand.

Follow the sources I reference in this blog post for future news on all three consoles as it breaks. And keep an eye out for my January 19^th, 2006 follow-on story where I'll exhaustively dissect Nintendo's handheld game console family and Sony's PlayStation Portable, as well as touch on other platforms such as Nintendo's on-hiatus N-Gage and Tiger Telematics' slow-out-of-the-gate Gizmondo.