This is the brand new, redesigned Xbox 360. Announced earlier today at Microsoft’s first press conference of this year’s E3 Expo the overhauled Xbox 360 is already being shipped to stores and will be made available for sale starting this week (In the US anyway, no word yet on a worldwide release). See the full spec list after the break.

The all new unit has shrunken in size and comes in a glossy black finish, perfect for those who like to collect fingerprints. Those of you eagle-eyed enough to have already looked at the photo will notice that there is no longer an external hard drive. The unit now comes, instead, with a 250GB hard drive nestled in a compartment in the base of the unit. It can be removed much like that of the PS3 although I wouldn’t hold your breach for this being hot-swappable with any old hard drive. As with most Xbox products, these babies are likely to be proprietary Microsoft hard drives only.

In addition, the new unit sports in-built 802.11n WiFi and an all touch-sensitive button configuration making it even harder to distinguish when you may or may not have actually pressed the button which turns your console on. By all accounts a correct press gives an acknowledged bleep though. Call me old fashioned but if all a button is doing is on/off open/close, I think I’d be far happier with some sort of haptic feedback. I digress.

The power brick has also been given the ‘honey I shrunk the kids’ treatment and the rear of this things sports more connections than Tiger Wood’s Blackberry Messenger contact list. Now with five USB ports (why?), HMDI, AV, Kinect connector, Ethernet, digital audio and a redesigned power connector the new box seems almost bloated with connectivity options.

The new Xbox is ‘Kinect Ready’ meaning that unlike any of the old Xbox models which will require a separate power supply and USB connection for Kinect to operate, this new model requires only the dedicated Kinect connector.

There’s no denying that this new Xbox looks decidedly more bad-ass than the previous iteration and almost laughs at the Elite’s mimicry. If you’re in the market for a new Xbox then this is the model you should be holding out for. At $299, the same price as the current 120GB model, this is a bargain.

Via Engadget