Shanda's (SNDA) new PC Entertainment Center had an embarrassing launch at the China International Consumer Electronics Show held late last week in Qingdao.
According to reporters in attendance at the show, Shanda's entertainment device broke several times while its functions were being displayed. And the time it took to restart the device after each crash has been compared to the long time it takes to boot a Windows computer.
Shanda says the crash was mainly caused by the narrow bandwidth, inadequate network and mismatched circuitry available at the exhibition hall, but it also admits that the product needs further debugging.
The box has cost Shanda US$450 million in the past year to develop. It is similar to a PC host machine in size and the operating board looks like that of DVD. It is heralded as a competitor to Microsoft's X-Box and Sony's Playstation.