HOLIDAYS 2010

You can see the announcement at the end of the last video I posted.

Of course they didn’t say which “holidays 2010″ it was. But I’m hoping for Valentine’s Day. So if you see Project Natal in shops next week, remember you heard it here first!

Of course, if they can’t quite make the Valentine’s day holiday release date, I will just have to settle for an Easter holidays release. The fact that they said “holidays“, plural, lends support to my Easter theory, since Easter lasts for several days.

But I may be being overly optimistic here. It would be wiser to assume the latest possible holiday in 2010, which would be Christmas, exactly one week before the end of the year. Or worst case scenario, it will be released to celebrate New Years Eve.

In all seriousness though, since Microsoft, unlike most of the world, are from the United States of America, it’s likely they were referring to a purely American holiday that nobody in the rest of the world knows anything about and wouldn’t know the date of if their life depended on it. Fortunately, we have Wikipedia, which says that the United States celebrates “Thanksgiving” on the last Thursday in November, which for 2010 means the 25th of November, one month before Christmas.

So it’s most likely Project Natal will be released in November, and the “holidays” are likely to be Thanksgiving and Christmas (and New Years Eve).

In related news, the PlayStation 3’s new motion controller, which doesn’t have a name yet, has been delayed to “Fall 2010″. Since they said “Fall” rather than “Autumn”, that’s a pretty good hint that they mean the northern hemisphere and what I, here in the Southern Hemisphere, would actually call “Spring”. And since they only say “Fall” in the United States, and the United States measures seasons starting from the equinox rather than the start of the month like we do here, that actually means somewhere between the 23rd of September and the 23rd of December (What I would call Spring and Summer).

So I think both the Playstation 3’s new motion controller and Project Natal will be released at roughly the same time, in November or October.

But which holiday are you hoping for?

And let’s hope companies eventually learn to give less ambiguous dates that the whole world can understand.