Rumours that Kinect was on its way to testers has proved true.
Those lucky people on the Microsoft Beta testing program are starting to receive home deliveries of the Kinect, plus an automatic update to their Xbox ahead of its official release in November. No surprises then that the guys over at engadget have already gotten hold of leaked images of the camera peripheral tucked inside its packaging.
We expect to see some early 'unofficial' reviews and rumours in the coming days from those testers out there who just love to tell us what they think of the latest Xbox 360 accessories. Let's hope they don't find any faults with it or people will be put off the thing before it even goes on sale, especially with the price of Kinect and its compatible games set to be so high.
As well as the motion-controller itself, Beta testers get to sample the new 360 dashboard and slimmer avatars that go with it as well (we'll pop up pictures of these when they emerge which they are bound to.)
Beta testing isn’t unusual for Microsoft who always runs extensive beta tests of all its new products with Xbox being no exception. Jon Hicks, Editor of the UK’s Official Xbox 360 Magazine says: “Similar invites went out ahead of the launch of the NXE interface update.”
Microsoft's job of hand-picking testers through its Connect service (which helps them get product feedback from consumers) obviously hasn't worked as despite the fact there would have been strict rules stated by the company ahead of its Beta program, invites were leaked to tech websites and now the images you can see below are making the rounds, though to be fair everyone knows what the device looks like by now anyway.
Source: engadget