Chinese OEM Sez: “Xbox 360 with Blu-ray Coming Soon”

After the death of HD DVD, everyone assumed that Blu-ray would be pronounced the overwhelming victor and we would have no choice but to opt for the Sony-backed format. Microsoft said that they weren’t going to go crawling to their competitor and thus, they promised that they would not be producing an Xbox 360 with a Blu-ray drive. A Chinese manufacturer is begging to differ.

Pegatron is an OEM subsidiary of Asustek (the guys behind the Eee PC), and this Chinese manufacturer is saying that they have secured a contract with Microsoft to produce a new batch of Xbox 360 home video game consoles. This normally wouldn’t be a very big deal — Microsoft uses Chinese OEMs all the time — except for the fact that this latest batch of 360s are set to come with Blu-ray drives.

This is an unconfirmed rumor from an unconfirmed source, but Pegatron is saying that the Blu-ray equipped Xbox 360s should start shipping in Q3 of this year.