2006 in review: A Wii stroke of genius

This winter, Microsoft waded into the high definition war, releasing an HD-DVD for the Xbox 360.

HD-DVD players were already far cheaper than Blu-ray drives – with Blu-ray manufacturers accusing their rivals of under-pricing the technology to boost sales – and suspicions were further heightened once Microsoft’s HD DVD drive landed in UK stores for just £130.

But as we said in our HD DVD drive review , it gives people, especially those that already own an Xbox 360, a cheap entry into the world of HD. And with the right drivers, can be hooked up to a PC as well.

December also saw Nintendo release its Wii. Queues were tame by console launch standards, but police still broke up crowds to avoid fights breaking out due to HMV only stocking 200 consoles .

Its launch was quickly followed by stories of holes in TVs and bruised limbs as the controller flew out of people’s hands while they waved the motion senor game pads around in the air.

BT joined the IPTV fray in December by launching its Vision TV on demand service. Billed as a cheaper version of Sky, needing only a 2Mbit/sec broadband connection, it came with an 80GB hard disk personal video recorder that has an HDMI output making it high definition future-proofed.

Sony's dreadful year finished on a low note as it announced a worldwide recall of eight Cybershot digital camera models sold between September 2003 and January 2005.

It was a year of knock backs for the company, after having to recall 1.8 million Li-ion batteries used in Dell and Apple laptops costing it a quarter of annual earnings. It also had to admit that the Playstation 3 was going to be delayed (and it’s still not available in Europe) and see rival high definition format HD DVD take an early lead.

One of the more bizarre products announced late in the year was Toshiba’s rewritable printer, but it had the PCW team in awe. Each plastic sheet of ‘paper’ could be printed on up to 500 times, but the big draw back was its £5.40 per sheet cost.

Small evolutionary steps were taken by AMD, which finally launched 65nm processors more than a year after Intel, Toshiba, which launched the first 8GB SD memory card, and Lite-on, which released the first 20-speed DVD writer.

The aforementioned Playstation 3 was launched in the US and Japan, with an initial allocation of 200,000 consoles in each territory. It led to an immediate shortage, with consoles selling on eBay for $4,000, a tad over the $600 retail price.

In a sign of change, both Dell expressed a desire open retail stores in the UK and Mesh decided it was time to sell through Comet, the second-largest UK electrical retailer.

Meanwhile AMD, whose processors were put into Dell PCs for the first time this year, paid $5.4bn for ATI and revealed plans for an all-in-one chip that would contain the traditional central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) on one piece of silicon, thus reducing costs.

Green was another definite theme in 2006, but Via was ridiculed for its 'carbon free computing' scheme. It said it would give a sticker to companies using its processor and plant trees to account for the carbon dioxide produced when powering them.

But Via wasn’t planting enough trees and those that it does will eventually release their own carbon dioxide.

See also:
2006 in review: The year of the free broadband
2006 in review: Zune, Origami and French-Canadian manhood