One device to rule them all

I considered posting a picture of the back of my TV but on reflection decided against it in case the flat gets condemned as a fire hazard. However, from memory there are two scarts, 3 hdmis, a composite, a component, a SVHS lead and two coaxial leads – all in all it’s a bit of a rats nest and we’re probably being exposed to similar levels of radiation as people living in outlying towns in the desirable Chernobyl area.

The current generation of consoles were always touted as convergence devices to a greater or lesser extent – multimedia Trojan Horses that steal their way under your TV and evict all the other hardware as surplus to requirements. I first bought an Xbox 360 thinking goodbye DVD player, goodbye CD player and so on, of course it didn’t quite work out like that. As is often been pointed out by the console's critics the under/over performing (I just don’t know) fan does make it sound like an early jetliner - not ideal when you’re trying to watch a film or listen to delicate Icelandic folk music. It also doesn’t play region-free DVD, which is important if you’re a nerd of my magnitude, but now I'm just being niggly.

Then came the Wii, I bought in to the hype and convinced myself it was an investment, a little white freedom fighter rescuing me from the burden of expensive gym membership. In reality the problem with Wii Fit is that it’s hard to take being chastised for my sloth by a passive aggressive cartoon balance board. I also find it quite boring - so now I just don’t go to the gym... Or do Wii Fit. Bear with me because this might sound unkind but I think you’ll take my meaning, if the Wii were a person it would likely be at the less alluring end of the attractiveness scale. It would likely make up for this by donning fashionably vintage attire and wandering around Camden or Brighton being studiedly kooky – no I don’t buy into standard notions of control, I’m a free spirit. Bad analogies aside the browser is a really quite intuitive and works well, it could be a real selling point from a convergence perspective so why oh why Mr. Nintendo do you a) hide it away in the Wii Shop and b) make people pay for it?

When I finally got an HD-ready TV it didn’t do the Wii any favours so that’s now gathering dust. In a previous post I discussed the barriers to getting much in the way of HD programming if you can’t sign up to Sky in the UK, I really wanted to (at least) be able to rent HD films from Blockbuster and had previously bet on the wrong horse in HD-DVD. I’d recently got my Christmas bonus so I took the plunge and got the PS3, I don’t use it much for gaming, since the current titles don’t really improve upon their Xbox counterparts, I also sold it in to my girlfriend as a multimedia player and I think she’s still pretty dubious about that claim! However as a convergence machine the PS3 is streets ahead of the competition.

It connects to the internet wirelessly and you aren’t walled in from the wider internet as you are by Xbox Live, it plays Blu-ray and works well as an up-scaling DVD player, and you can even buy a handy add on that turns it into a PVR thanks to its decent sized hard drive.

So will I be chucking out all the other entertainment devices cluttering up the living room? Well no, apart from my obvious fetish for exotic wires, games consoles positively hoover up electricity, which isn’t great from an environmental or bills perspective. Hardware that only has one function may seem rather quaint in the consumer tech world but at least you’re only paying for it to do one thing at a time.