Following last week’s appearance of the first Jasper Xbox 360s, Microsoft has revealed that the budget-priced Xbox 360 Arcade model has now moved to physical internal memory storage. Instead of getting a 512MB external memory unit, each console comes with 256MB of flash memory on the mainboard.

Although the Jasper boards come with a quieter running 65nm GPU, it’s hard to see the removal of external memory as particularly beneficial to anyone but Microsoft. Now, instead of having a memory card that you could stick in your pocket and take round to your mate’s house, it’s welded firmly to the inside of the case and won’t be going anywhere. If you want the portability, you’re jolly well going to have to pay for it.

On top of that, half of that precious memory is going to be eaten up by the 128MB NXE update that rolled out last month. In fact, if you bought an Arcade before this upgrade, you’re in a slightly better position as you’re probably entitled to a free 512MB memory card upgrade, courtesy of Microsoft. That at least will give a lot more room to save your games.

We’d still heartily recommend that you consider getting a hard drive for your console though. They are unfairly expensive, true, but they’re also essential for getting at the wealth of game demos and video available on Xbox LIVE. If you’ve got a few gigs left to spare, you can now install your games and eliminate the howling siren from the disc drive.

Out now| From £130 | Microsoft (via Xbox360Fanboy)