Microsoft Kinect Shredded At iFixit

Those geeks over at iFixit took their shiny new Kinect for the Xbox 360 and started tearing the thing apart as soon as it hit the office. It's a dirty job, but someone has to gut all the cool new gadgets and iFixit does it with mucho gusto.

For some reason the Kinect looked smaller in all the pics I have seen and seeing it on the iFixit bench, the thing is huge. The motorized base has plastic gears, I hope they hold up well. The single cooling fan sucks air in one side of the Kinect housing and spits it out the other to keep things cool.

IFixit says that the two cameras and the IR projector that sense the player are more like webcam lenses with autofocus than the lenses in your smartphone. The mainboard has chips from Wolfson, Fairchild, NEC, Marvel, and a few other vendors. Check out the full teardown here.