Zephyr

We all knew it was coming. Now it's finally official. Microsoft announced that the Xbox 360 Elite, formally know as the Zephyr, will be available in the US on April 29 for $479. The new version of the console will sport a sleek black finish, a larger 120GB hard drive, and HDMI output capabilities.

The larger hard drive will allow you to store more media from the Xbox Live Marketplace on the console and you'll finally get up to 1080p of HD output with the HDMI support.

It should be interesting to see how well the Elite will do against the 60GB version of the PS3.

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.

This would probably be an appropriate time to say something like "already!?" It all started when Engadget got their hands on a leaked picture of an Xbox 360 sporting an HDMI port. As most HD buffs know, HDMI is the holy grail of digital video output. The high-end PS3 unit has one, but the lower-end PS3 and Xbox 360 do not. The updated hardware has been given the codename "Zephyr" and appears to include a new scaler chip that produces that higher resolution images.