Let the polarized reviewing begin!

Well, it's that time of year again when people draw a line in the sand and say "either you're with us or against us". We're not talking about the election, though, rather we're going through the same predictable news cycle you see every time Microsoft releases new products. It's the usual binary stuff, with everyone falling into either the "Kill Bill" camp or the fan boy "Microsoft is great" camp. While a lot of this is entertaining, we rarely get what we need out of all this, which is an accurate review of a gadget that's been tested under real world situations.

Two of the very first reviews of the new Portable Media Center basically completely contradict each other. The first is Jim Louderback's "Another Dumb idea from Microsoft", the other W.G. Ryan's
"Microsoft and Creative Hit a Home Run". Here are some choice words from each, and you can probably guess which one is which:

One guy had an iPOD and made a snipe comment about indicating "wow, Microsoft is making something that Apple was
doing years ago, just like Windows". I couldn't let him disgrace my new toy so I asked him how many DVD's
he can play on his iPod. "Oh, I didn't realise it played video" to which I replied "looks like Microsoft is
poised to kick Apple's a33 again, just like Windows...

And

"The PMC tries to be good, but it's so full of compromises it winds up being worse than Bill Gates doing the
white-boy rap with Eminem."

These first reviews will be the talking points for pretty much every other reviews, just rinsed and repeated, so in the interest of actually contributing something meaningful, we're preparing our own in-depth review of the Portable Media Center. We promise tons of photos and video clips, and that we'll actually use the thing for a week or so to get a feel for what it's really like. And if you've got anything you'd like to see covered in our review, post it up in the comments, we'll try and include it.