2006 certainly seems like the year of gaming and entrainment. Aside from the PlayStation 3, Wii and release of the Zune, Google also decided to buyout Youtube. The future of gaming and online videos was starting to warm up.

Play Station 3
The Xbox 360 had almost a full year of no competition before its first competitor came out. That was the PlayStation 3, and the most powerful of the three consoles. It was also the most expensive of the three, and the only to have a Blu-Ray drive inside. Some considered this to be a Trojan horse because at the time, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD where still fighting for our living room. Of course, Blu-Ray won and it’s possible that it got a little help from its PS3 friend.

If you had a High Definition TV, the Play Station 3 was for you. Boasting the best and sharpest graphics (in my opinion) it was definitely well worth the money. If not for the games, then definitely for the media aspects of it. Aside from being the cheapest Blu-Ray player, it also plays back a variety of media formats and unlike the Xbox 360, Wifi was included as standard.

On top of this, original models also included support for PS2 games, something that was later discontinued. Why? Well it seems that the PlayStation 3 wasn’t selling as well as Sony liked. It was even being beaten by the PlayStation 2. So why then, make an all in one device that saves consumers money when they can buy two of them. With this mentality, the PlayStation 2 is still sold alongside the PlayStation 3 today, the first of any kind to do so.

The Slim version of the Play Station 3 came in 2009 which features an updated hard drive and is 33% smaller, 36% lighter and 34% more energy efficient than its predecessor (good things come in three’s right?).
The future of the PlayStation (probably named the PlayStation 4) remains undecided. The PS3 is more than powerful enough to take it into the next generation (going off raw processing power alone) but thanks to the new casual market Nintendo have created, there’s no knowing what we’ll see in the years to come. I’m just waiting for Gran Turismo 5 to come out.

Nintendo Wii
If the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii where to get into a fight, the PlayStation would snap it like a twig. That’s until Nintendo gets its mates together (all 50 million of them) which, in that case, the PlayStation wouldn’t stand a chance.

The Nintendo Wii, released in 2006 was the last console of the 7th generation to be released, the cheapest, and least powerful. But that didn’t matter to Nintendo, because they were after a new market. The fun, family based casual market where people didn’t have the time to sit down and play long shooting games. It was a risky move for Nintendo that paid off big time. Not only did Nintendo turn a profit on every console sold (unlike the other two), but it sold them in millions and quickly broke records to become the fastest selling console in Australian history.

Rather than use a traditional controller, the Wii made use of a magical wand, dubbed the Wii Mote. Rather than push buttons all day, the user could simply wave the Wii Mote around to stimulate whatever it was they were doing.

This also created a new form of revenue for publishers. Much like the iPhone apps, people found that they could write terrible gimmicky games that made use of waving the controller around and have people buy them. This has made the ratio of great games to poor games very low (I’d say somewhere between 1:20). Personally, I’d love to see more games from the Nintendo 64 era make their way onto the Wii. I loved games like Donkey Kong, Yoshi Story, Banjo Kazooie and Goldeneye when I was younger and rather disappointed that the only game that can come close to this on the Wii (that I’ve played anyway) was Super Mario Galaxy (and even then I still preferred Super Mario 64 to Galaxy).

To sum it up quite nicely, the Wii is great fun if you have real friends that you can invite round. The Xbox is good for all of your online friends that you’ve never met before and the PlayStation 3 is good for a bit of single player gaming. After seeing the success that the Wii has had on the market, it seems clear that Sony and Microsoft will try and come up with something similar (see PlayStation Motion Controller and Project Natal respectively) but will they do so at the expense of traditional gaming?

YouTube
Google sent the world into shock one November morning when they announced that they would buyout YouTube for $1.65 billion dollars. It was an interesting acquisition by Google as it is still trying to find a way to make money from it and it’s not cheap either, bandwidth costs alone are supposedly costing more than one million dollars per day.

If anything it was a move to prevent someone else from buying it out and capitalising on the success of it. Google knew that internet video would soon take off and wanted something it would be able to use at a future date. 10 minute uploads on videos soon stopped anyone trying to upload movies or TV shows illegally, and Google now seems to be trying to secure deals with networks to have show’s and movies on there. Of course, only if you’re in the US.

It’s amazing to think at how much YouTube has been able to embed itself into today’s society. You can find cameras with direct uploading to YouTube and our new TV can even view YouTube videos. It’s currently the 4th most popular website in the world, and serves over one billion videos per day (that’s one in six people watching one video per day).

Back in 2006, HD video on YouTube seemed stupid and pointless. There weren’t enough people with decent connections to warrant it, and it was almost impossible to do so thanks to limitations of Adobe flash. Those days are long gone and YouTube’s first full HD video was uploaded earlier this year.

Google Docs and Spread sheets
It was only a matter of time before Google started to edge into Microsoft territory, and it started with the release of Google Spread sheets. It soon acquired Writely (an online word processor) and the two of them became Google Docs and Spread sheets.

Google Docs and Spread sheets (later renamed Google Docs) stayed rather dormant until 2009, at which point it started an aggressive campaign against Microsoft Office. Google Doc’s touted benefits such as always having access to your documents online, and offline access when you need it (through your web browser and Google Gears). This left Microsoft no other choice but to release web based versions of its Office suite, dubbed Office Web Apps.

Personally, I’m not a big fan of using a web browser to edit my documents. I’m more than happy to use Microsoft word (or notepad) when I need to make a quick note and by doing it this way, I have complete control over the privacy of my work. Not to mention the fact that I can’t get internet access everywhere and the Offline version of it fails to let you create new documents.

Zune
After years of sitting back watching Apple print money with the iPod, Microsoft finally decides to do something about it. Although it seems, halfway through a marketing meeting someone thought it would be a great idea to limit the Zunes release to just the US and Canada. This has prevented the Zune from making any dent in the iPods sales, despite being somewhat superior in almost every way.

For starters, the Zune doesn’t have a click wheel, but rather squircle called the Zune Pad. Unlike the iPod, all motions used with the Zune Pad can be turned off, or substitute buttons can be used in the event of you wearing gloves. All Zunes also come with Wifi which allow you to wirelessly synchronise your music without having to plug it into your computer. That feature alone is amazing, but it gets better- You can share music wirelessly with other Zunes. And of course, you don’t need iTunes to use it.

It’s interesting to note though, that in all marketing for the Zune, it’s always called Zune and never the Microsoft Zune (as opposed to the Apple iPod). Microsoft has certainly done this for a reason, as people would more than likely be deterred from buying it if they know Microsoft was behind it.

Twitter
If you asked me back in 2000 if I thought that everyone would be communicating in 160 characters of less by the end of 2009, I would have probably said it would have something to do with SMS. No one had any idea that Micro Blogging would soon take off as people realised that they could tell random strangers exactly what they were doing at any given moment.

Like Google Docs, Twitter stayed relatively quiet until 2009 at which point the site just seemed to explode. Everyone signed up just to see what the fad was all about, but quickly left with reports stating that 60% of all users quit after just one month.

Some say that twitter is just a pointless way to make people feel important and on that angle I would agree with them, but I also see that Twitter has a purpose and is a great way of informing people of the latest news. The Iran elections where a great example of this, as it allowed ordinary citizens to post instant updates to everyone in the world letting them know what is going on.