XBox 720 Info Leaked; $299 with Kinect 2
Well well, look what we have here. A 56 page document outlining the Xbox's timeline has been leaked. The report has a bit of age on it--it comes from August, 2010--but tracking forward much of what we have seen has been accurate.
First, the XBox 720. It is referred to as the 720, so the press has gotten that right so far. The 720 will have blu-ray support, native 1080P 3D support, will be "always on", and have 6X the performance of the current XBox, which personally I think should be higher. Microsoft hasn't decided on whether to opt for ARM or X86 processors yet, nor whether to go with 6 or 8 cores.
But regardless it looks like the new 720 will have 3 PPC cores for backwards compatibility with current games. It will, of course, feature the Kinect 2. The Kinect 2 will feature 4 player gaming and support for props, which probably means foam swords and pickaxes (for Minecraft, of course!) I would imagine that Microsoft will reduce the latency of the controller and increase the sensitivity of the sensor, as well as boosting the quality of the cameras built into the unit.
Finally, the document describes the next generation of console looking more like a set top box than a video game console, which belies the 720's positioning as the only box you need. Microsoft has been focusing more and more on content over gaming, and it seems like that has been the plan for quite a while.
The XBox 720 is targeted for a 2013 release and is planned to have a 10 year lifecyce, made possible by a scalable architecture.
Apparently Microsoft has also been working on augmented reality glasses a la Google Glass. Codenamed project Fortaleza, it is described as being a "breakthrough heads up and hands-free device." It is being billed as a platform expansion slated for 2014, so it won't launch with the 720.
Keep in mind that all this information has some age on it. We've seen much of what was described come to pass--they describe a focused Metro-style interface that we now have on the XBox 360, for example--but that doesn't mean that Microsoft has stuck to its timetable.
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