This may lend some credence to the new SKUs having increased memory.  Of course that doesn't help existing boxes.

its now more like the playstation eye.

one uses gyropscope and accelorometers, and the other a infra red bursts.

by that means they are probably aiming for a 50$ pricepoint or less, since its only a 1.3mpx CMOS sensor.

because....?

And thus, my skepticism for Natal increases.
I, personally, would rather spend more and get the best product possible. If removing the chip doesn't hamper it's capabilities at all, then it's fine. But I don't think the 360's processing power should be pushed any more than it has to be.

I personally like this idea. I definitely would not have considered natal if it was 99$. Now if it's 49$, I might just get a 360 and natal.

The SDKs got the increased memory, not the devices available to the public.

lol, that's being a little too harsh don't you think?  Has there been any word on how much processing power this bone structure calculation requires?

I don’t think this will have much of an impact on the games that get produced for Natal being that the vast majority of them will be amazingly inexpensive games that target “casual” games in a patronizing way. With that said, this does add some reason for being concerned about the eventual announcement of the release price of Natal; while I haven’t seen anyone mention it, this could really be a move from Microsoft to reduce the manufacturing cost of Natal because they were afraid it was hitting a price level where it couldn’t be successful regardless of the software produced for it.

Although anyone with a degree of common sense will not welcome this from a hardware point of view you must admit it makes economical sense.

I am disappointed as I wont get the hardware spec that I was led to believe I would and it brings the natal camera more inline with the PS eye (although natal is still superior).

You would call me liar but this had occured to me a while back when the x360 camp was bragging about the chips built into natal that made it such a big leap from the PS eye.

I was thinking costs, but knowing MS I thought they would happily take the losses and sell natal for less than cost to produce.

Some others also pointed this out in their posts but were called rather rude names by the x360 camp.

One thing's for sure without the bone structure we will never get to see again the amazing 1:1 Natal full body tracking ^^ :