Is there a more disappointing bit of technology than the X-box 360? Its so bad that even Nick Clegg doesn’t bother with it.

I bought one for my kids a few weeks back, and I’m struggling to get over how badly designed it is. Turn it on and its the aural equivalent of a clapped out washing machine; playing it for more than a couple of hours at a time results in it switching itself off because its overheated (you can even buy a little add-on to cool the thing down, which it probably would have been useful for the designers to think about before they launched it); and on top of that its just pretty damn ugly…a horrible black box reminiscent of a bog-standard work PC that come second in a fist fight. If the X-box was a person it’d be a teenager (or lad in his 30′s who wants to be a teenager) with personal hygiene problems,  which I suppose is fair enough as that pretty more or less its target market.

Of course the kids love it, but really, what do they know?

Next week: Why those Apple ipod ‘walkman’ things will never catch on…