Friday, October 21, 2005

360 Kiosk and Wal-Mart

By the way, after Target I dragged Gloria to the scary huge Wal-Mart to see if they had a 360 kiosk set up.

Believe it or not, they did (Super Wal-Mart at Parmer and I-35 in Austin).

So get this. Microsoft does an excellent job getting these kiosks out to Wal-Mart two months before launch. And Wal-Mart is absolutely a terrific choice--they're by far the largest broadline retailer in the country. And they even set up these kiosks with widescreen HD LCD screens. Great, great job.

Oh yeah, except they're running them in the freaking 4:3 aspect ratio instead of 16:9 for widescreen sets! Everything looks slightly stretched, circles look a bit fat, and I'm not convinced they were even displaying 720p since they couldn't get the damn aspect ratio right.

It's incredible, really. Do all the work to get those units to the stores and then set them up with the wrong aspect ratio and quite possibly the wrong display output.

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