According to Know-It-All EDN newspaper in China, Pegatron Technology (bastard offspring of Asustek, in case you’re wondering), has managed to grab the highly-denied “Blu-Ray for Xbox360” deal of the year. We imagine Microsoft denied the existence of such unit, not to shield its upcoming launch from the competition’s prying marketeers, but rather because its staff were responding in default “mirror” mode whereby hacks that asked the Vole if they had plans for a BD add-on, they received a 100% flat/honest “No”. True. All things considered, it won’t be an add-on.

The newspaper adds that Pegatron will assemble Microsoft’s console with the in-built BD player, with units hitting the market in Q3/2008 – Mid-summer, as it were. This goes head-on with Dean Takahashi’s info on the Xbox 360 “Jasper” platform that is scheduled for August of this year. We'd already mentioned this platform over here, btw. The Jasper will feature a shrunken 65nm ATI graphics core and “smaller memory chips”. This does make more sense if you’re using the new GPU core to aid you in decoding HD on Blu-ray, too.

You can read the entire article at The Inquirer.