Microsoft says Zephyr was "experimentation"

We posted a story about the possibility of Microsoft releasing an updated Xbox 360 sporting an HDMI port. During an interview with Gamespot UK, Microsoft game group general manager Chris Satchell said, "At the moment, everything you might have seen is just looking at our experimentation back in Redmond, not really a product that we're thinking about announcing."

Experimentation or not, an Xbox 360 with an HDMI port is cool. And it would be one more thing Microsoft could do match the PlayStation 3. But for now, this is just a group of highly skilled engineers tinkering around.

We're always working on prototypes and new technologies and just playing with stuff in Redmond to see what's interesting. I think at the moment we have the widest available connections on the system. If you want to get great HD, I think we've got a good solution for that. In the future it's interesting to see where standards evolve to. I think one of the problems that the whole industry, us and entertainment, are facing at the moment is we're in this world where standards are evolving very quickly.

We have different high-definition standards for discs that we know are competing at the moment. We think HD-DVD is going to be the right way to go, but really it's all about choice in that system so that's why we're offering these sort of services with downloads--skip that whole "format wars" problem. With other standards, audiovideo standards, they're evolving very quickly as well. We're obviously keeping an eye on that and saying, "What are the future standards and how do we give consumers the right choice for that?"